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Moving a Wordpress Installation

Monday, January 5th, 2009

If you’ve moved a WordPress installation from one domain to another (or just between directories on the same domain), you might find that you can’t log in, and that lots of the CSS and images are missing.

The problem is that WordPress stores a partial URL in the wp_options table, and that partial URL is used to submit the login form, among other things.  So, you can do one of a few things:

  1. Reinstall WordPress at the new location,
  2. Move the installation back to the original location and make the changes via the GUI, or
  3. Hand-edit the database to make the required changes.

If you choose option #3, there are two rows in the wp_options table that need to be changed.  The option names are ‘home’ and ’siteurl’.  Changing those will at least allow you to log in, and any further changes can be made via the GUI.