after changing the wordpress adress and site address in localhost xampp then it not working anymore

Question

I am new in creating a website using wordpress. I am using xampp to create a local wordpress website and my website run under: localhost/mysite. I want to import my local website to my live website https://vsaftest.wordpress.com/ by going to the setting of my local website and then changed the wordpress Address and site address from http://localhost/mysite to https://vsaftest.wordpress.com/. After that then I can not access to my local site using http://localhost/mysite anymore, and inside the website https://vsaftest.wordpress.com/ there is nothing there also. I know that I made a mistake here but then anyone can help me how can I change back so that I can access my site from localhost :(

Answer 1

I've never used Wordpress before, but going purely from your desription, you seem to think that changing a setting on and for your local machine will somehow affect the settings on a remote machine.

and inside the website https://vsaftest.wordpress.com/ there is nothing there also

But was there nothing there beforehand either? In other words; Nothing's changed?

I think the reason you cannot view your local site anymore is precisely because you made the change you said you did. Instead of its changing the remote machine (which it probably doesn't do...I don't do WP dev, so I don't know for sure) it changed your local machine.

Can you not just change wordpress Address and site address on your local site back to what it was before?

Answer 2

There are many pitfalls one might encounter when moving a Wordpress website from a local development environment to production. Here are the main things to remember and look out for.

Htaccess

When developing in Xampp it's very common to include the website's directory name in the .htaccess' RewriteBase and RewriteRule. Assuming your production website will be situated in the root directory you'll want to remove the directory references from your .htaccess file. For example your development .htaccess file might look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /mysite.com/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /mysite.com/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

But in production you'll need to adjust it to look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

One good development practice you can adopt is creating .live and .dev htaccess files. Create .htaccess.dev and .htaccess.live files and store your development and production htaccess data in them respectively. Your real .htaccess file will then contain the current active data and you can easily copy/paste from the .dev and .live files to it if needed.

Database

When you move a Wordpress website to production you must also create a production database for it. Make sure the database created has the same collation as the development one and that the database credentials in your wp-config.php file are updated to reflect the production database user, password, etc. Remember that if your WP_DEBUG variable is not set to true database errors will not be shown if a database connection error occurred in your production website. Because of that database errors in production more often than not lead to a "white screen of death".

Another thing one must make sure (and you already mentioned in your question) is that the siteurl and homeurl keys in your wp_options table are updated to reflect the production website url. In case multiple domains exist (for example .com and .co) one can enforce the correct url by defining the WP_SITEURL and WP_HOMEURL constants dynamically within the wp-config.php file.

PHP version

Last but not least, make sure the PHP version required for your website is compatible with the production server's PHP version. 2017 is a transitional year in terms of PHP support. Whereas Xampp already supports PHP 7 sadly many servers still do not.