Moving your WordPress from local machine to the hosting account

In the beginning, Many of us once at least wondered, how to move all the files and media of local WordPress site from local desktop/laptop to the hosting site.

We create a beautiful WordPress site and that works and looks beautiful on our local laptop.

Let us understand how should we move those magical files into the hosting site along with its underlying database files.

Steps to upload WordPress website from localhost to GoDaddy

Step 1:

On your local WordPress site, do the following before moving files.

At Local server (localhost)

• Settings > General
• Change the localhost / IPs to the domain.com
• Save

• Once you click Save.
• The page would not be found.

Step 2:

• On you laptop/Desktop, find the folder where your WordPress files are located.
• Zip that folder
• Now, Login to Live server CPanel (GoDaddy)
• Go to File Manager and start uploading your WP-Files from the local machine.
• On the GoDaddy CPanel, select “Public html”
• On GoDaddy Cpannel. Click on upload

• Locate the zipped folder and upload that to GoDaddy
• On the “Public_html” directory.
• On your GoDaddy, locate the zipped file and select the extract” button.
• Once the files are extracted, you may delete the Zipped file if you prefer.
• All files from that folder need to be copied under the same directory.
• So, select all files and click on “Move” to “public_html/”

Step 3:

Creation of MySQL user and database hosting

• Now, need to create a MySQL user & a database on the GoDaddy hosting.
• Click on MySQL under Databases

• According to the hosting plan, you may have only one DB, which would be auto-generated while you buy hosting.
• So, need to rename the existing name.

• The same thing does for the user also. (Either create a new one or rename the older)
• But make sure the user has full privilege on the DB. ( Add the user to the DB)
• Change the password of the user.

Step 4:

Now, need to edit “wp-config.php” file on GoDaddy.

So, click on that file (wp-config.php) and click on “Code Editor”

Update new info of MySQL username/password and database name (That you have performed on step3)

Step 5:

Now, Open localhost/phpmyadmin on your laptop.

Select the database and export all contents.

Select custom, file format as “sql” and give some name to the backup file.

Now, that backup file needs to be uploaded into GoDaddy “phpmyadmin”

Now on your GoDaddy, phpMyAdmin. Select the DB name and click Import 

Now, go to the browser and type your domain name

Now, the local server won`t be able to view the website.

So, login to local phpmyadmin

Go to “wp-options”

Change the database under site URL & home to localhost