3. Prepare the move
3.1 Make sure your WordPress versions are consistent
If you’re running an older version of WordPress on your live site, you need to make sure what you’re transferring to your new site is going to work. You can do this two ways. Either upgrade your live site to the latest version of WP, or do it offline. Because upgrading a live site usually involves an hour or so of downtime and causes disruption to plugins and the like, I elected to upgrade offline. That way my readership only gets one disruption rather than two. (I suppose you could try a third way – send an old format database into a your brand new live site and hope for the best, but that’s not recommended)
3.2 Set up your test blog at your existing webhost
3.2.1 Set up the subdomain
You can do this by setting up a subdomain in cPanel. Say the subdomain is test.yourdomain.com.
3.2.2 Install WordPress
Install the latest version of WordPress in the subdomain’s root directory using the Fantastico plugin.
If you go to test.yourdomain.com in your browser, you’ll see the familiar “hello world” message in the default WordPress theme.
Go into phpMyAdmin and you’ll see the new database (with probably 10 tables).
3.2.3 Transfer the template files, images, plugins and other uploads
This is simply a matter of copying all the images from the old webhost onto the new one using the ftp account you set up in 2.4. Be careful to maintain the same directory structure.
In addition, make sure you copy over your active theme and all the plugins.
Don’t transfer over your WordPress files themselves (because they’re the old versions). Especially don’t transfer over your wp-config file. But if you use pretty permalinks you’ll probably find you need to transfer over your .htaccess file as it has the crucial redirect rules to make the permalinks work.
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