Uploading A Wordpress Site to a Live Server

There are a thousand and one tutorials on the internet that teach how to go about this (title of post). There are as well a plethora of plugins that claim to help you do this. I have tried most and what I have found is that, these plugins are not reliable and the tutorials are not always complete. These are the steps I take to upload a wordpress installation.

1. Make a backup of your database from your development server, i.e export the database you created when you started working on your wordpress based site. somethings.sql
2. Cleanup your website, i.e get rid of all unused plugins and media files, this causes unneccessary bloat.
3. Create a database on your production (live) server and upload the backup of your datebase (done in step 1), something.sql
4. On your production server database, replace all instances of http:\\localhost with http:\\newdomain.com in database uploaded in step 3.
5. Edit your wp-config.php file with the credentials of your production server, i.e [“DB_NAME”, “DB_USER”, “DB_PASSWORD”, “DB_HOST”]
6. Upload your websites directory/src/folder to the root of your production server. http:\\newdomain.com
7. Your website should be up and running, no messy plugins needed.

Do not forget to change the password you used in development.