I’ve done WordPress domain changes a few times. Most of the time it’s just a way of importing a production installation to my development environment, but I’ve done it a couple times on production environments. To be clear, I’ve never had a problem with it. There’s a first time for everything, right?
WordPress documentation regarding the subject:
Changing The Site URL
Moving WordPress
Wasted Time
Last night I did what I always do, which is to follow the instructions in the WordPress docs. The result was a white screen of death. Fortunately I had made a backup of my database, so I reverted back to that and tried it again, and then another way, and then another way. I don’t know if it is version 3.8.1 or what, but I never did get it to work in the quick and easy fashion I am used to.
It took hours. I had to manually transfer all of the blog posts, comments, settings, etc. This wouldn’t be that bad if WordPress didn’t have it’s own magic quotes type thing going on. All of the line breaks had to be converted too.
So, of course I have no good news for you if you’ve arrived here on this page looking for a solution to the same predicament. If you figure it out, let me know!