How to Move a WordPress Website from Localhost to a Live Server

Building a WordPress site locally with LocalWP, MAMP, or XAMPP and then launching it on a live server involves a specific set of problems the “new server” or “new domain” scenarios don’t fully cover — mainly because localhost or a tool-specific local address is baked into the database in ways a normal migration doesn’t anticipate.

Locally, your site’s address is something like localhost:10003 or mysite.local — an address that means nothing outside your own computer. Every one of those references in the database needs to become your real domain, exactly like a domain change, with the same serialized-data risk described in a standard domain migration. On top of that, local environments often run a different PHP version than your live host, use different file permission conventions, and — depending on the tool — store the database in a format or location that isn’t a simple phpMyAdmin export away.

LocalWP has a built-in “Export Site” feature that packages files and database together, which is the simplest starting point if you’re using it. MAMP and XAMPP typically require you to export the database manually through phpMyAdmin (usually reachable at localhost/phpmyadmin) and separately copy the site’s file folder from your local sites directory.

Compare your local PHP version against what your live host actually runs — mismatches here are a common cause of a site that worked perfectly locally throwing fatal errors the moment it’s live. Also check for any hardcoded local paths in custom code (an absolute file path baked into a theme’s functions.php during local development is a classic, easy-to-miss cause of a broken-looking live site).

Create the database on your live host, import your exported SQL file, upload the site files (typically via SFTP, since plain FTP over a slow connection can silently drop large media files on a big upload), update wp-config.php with the live database credentials, and then handle the URL replacement from your local address to your real domain — the same serialization-aware requirement as any domain change.

Quick Restore can back up your local install (install it in your local WordPress the same as any live site) and restore directly onto the live server, with the localhost-to-domain URL rewrite handled automatically as part of the normal restore flow — the same mechanism used for any domain change, not a special local-only mode you have to configure differently. Chunked upload also matters more than usual here: local sites built with a lot of media during development are often larger than people expect, and this avoids hitting the live host’s upload limit at exactly the wrong moment.

Check Settings → Reading to make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” — a checkbox many local environments enable by default during development — isn’t still checked on the live version. It’s a common, easy-to-miss reason a freshly launched site doesn’t show up in search results for weeks after going live.