Synchronization of WordPress Sites

You can synchronize the content of your WordPress site including files and database with another WordPress site.

Let us say you maintain a non-public (staging) version of a WordPress site on a separate domain or subdomain and a publicly available (production) version of this site on a production domain. You may want to synchronize your WordPress sites in the following situations:

• You want to copy the changes you have made to the staging version to the production version.
• You want to copy the data from the production site to the staging site to see how the changes (for example, a new plugin) work with the production data. After checking that everything works fine, you may copy your changes to your production site.
• You have made some changes (for example, installed a new plugin) to the staging site, and these changes resulted in new tables being added to the database. You want to copy only these tables to the production site without affecting other data.
• You have upgraded the staging site to a newly released version of WordPress and fixed the post-upgrade issues (if any). You now want to push these changes to the production site.
• You can choose to synchronize the WordPress files, the WordPress database, or both the files and the database. When synchronizing the database, you can choose to synchronize all tables, or tables that are present on the source server but absent from the destination server, or you can specify individual database tables to be synchronized.

When performing the sync, keep in mind the following:

• The selected data are copied from the source site to the destination site. Any files and/or database tables present both on the source and the destination that are not identical are copied from the source to the destination. Files and database tables present only on the destination are not affected.
• During synchronization, the destination site enters maintenance mode and becomes temporarily unavailable.
• If the WordPress version on the destination site is earlier than on the source site, WordPress Toolkit first upgrades WordPress on the destination site to match the version installed on the source site, and then runs the synchronization.
• If the WordPress version on the source site is earlier than on the destination site, synchronization is aborted. To synchronize data, you need to upgrade WordPress on the source to the version installed on the destination, or a later version.
• If the database prefix on the source and the destination differs, WordPress Toolkit will change the database prefix on the destination site to match that on the source during sync.
• Synchronization of data between a regular WordPress instance and a multisite one is not supported. We recommend using cloning instead.

NOTE: During synchronization, files and database tables copied from the source overwrite those present on the destination. Any changes made to the files and database tables on the destination prior to synchronization will be discarded and lost without warning.

NOTE: If you have caching plugins installed on a WordPress website you want to synchronize with, clear the cache on the source website before sync. Otherwise, the destination website might work incorrectly.

To synchronize a WordPress site data with another site

1. Go to WordPress in the menu on the left.

2. Click the Copy Data button located within the section of the WordPress installation you wish to copy data from.

3. In the Target drop-down menu, select the destination WordPress installation you want to synchronize the data with.

4. Under Data to Copy, select which data you wish to synchronize with the destination WordPress site. The following options are available:

• Files Only (the default option) - synchronizes only the website files including the WordPress core files and the files related to themes and plugins.

NOTE: The files wp-config, .htaccess, and web.config will not be synchronized as changing of these files may disrupt the operation of WordPress.

• Database Only - synchronizes only the database. You can select to import all, new, or selected database tables (for details, see the Database synchronization section below).
• Files and Database - synchronizes both the website files and the database. You can choose to import all, new, or selected database tables by selecting the corresponding option (for details, see the Database synchronization section below).

1. If Database was selected via one of the options above, next select which tables from within the database will be copied.

NOTE: The default Exceptions to the tables which will be copied pertain to your website's pages, posts and users. To leave the pages, post and users of your Target intact, leave the default Exceptions selected. To overwrite the pages, posts and users of your Target with that of your Source, uncheck the Exceptions.

When copying data from a Source to a Target, restore point will be created. If the copying of data needs to be undone, the restore point can be utilized to Restore your WordPress to it's state just prior to the syncronization being performed

2. When you are satisfied with the selected destination and the content to be synchronized, click Start.
3. When the synchronization is finished, you will see a page displaying the settings of the source WordPress installation. On it, you can see the last time synchronization was performed, along with the option to perform a Restore and effectively undo the synchronization.

Database synchronization

When you choose to synchronize databases (that is, you have selected either the Database Only or the Files and Database option), you need to specify which database tables you want to synchronize:

• All Tables (the default option)
• New tables
• Selected tables. If you select this option, you can see the list of available database tables and select which ones you want to synchronize. If you want to synchronize all changes except for pages, posts, and users, you can select all database tables except the tables with the _postmeta, _posts, _username, and _users suffixes, by clicking the corresponding link.