This Friday, we’re going back to Wednesday… Specifically, #WordpressWednesday, which our IT Manager, Kalvin, publishes on LinkedIn every Wednesday. In this article, Kalvin talks about some tools to make your site management easier. Read the full article below!
Doc! Doc!
This #WordPressWednesday, we’re going to go back a few weeks. Recently I posted about site migration and a couple of helpful tools that make moving a WordPress site a relatively easy process.
One of those tools is called Update URLs – it’ll update your site’s URL structure from olddomain.com to newdomain.com.
But what if you want to do a site-wide search and replace involving other text? Maybe you need to swap out someone’s email address, or your organization gets a new job title structure (i.e. everyone is now a Director instead of a Manager).
Man, this is heavy!
One plugin that will help with this is called Better Search Replace. This plugin will perform a textual search and replace on any (or all) of your site’s database tables.
It includes some nice features, too. One of my favorites is the “dry run” feature, where it will go through and determine what changes would occur and let you know, without actually making the changes. This is handy if you’re a bit uncertain about things.
If my calculations are correct, once this plugin hits 88 miles per hour, you’re gonna see some serious…stuff.
There is a Pro version which adds some nice functionality – the big features being a report on exactly what was changed and a backup/import function while making changes.
However, if you don’t need those features, it’s free! (Great Scott!)
The free version has worked great for me. It performs the search and replace and reports on the number of changes in each table, without getting specific about what was changed. I don’t really need a listing of everywhere that was changed – I can check a few things myself to be sure it went through properly. And backups are something we all have in place already, right? Plus, this plugin doesn’t require much in terms of server power.
1.21 gigawatts!?
So why wouldn’t I just recommend using this search and replace plugin when migrating, instead of Update URLs? You certainly can! I find Update URLs to be a bit easier to use for that specific purpose, but your mileage may vary. Whichever road you choose, I’m sure it’ll work out well for you.
Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need…roads.
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Follow Kalvin for more #WordpressWednesday tips HERE.
