Migration to new domain – Page Builder Templates Not Appearing in Pages

[meikam123]

Hi mate – URGENT problem.
We have just migrated the site with Barely Corporate to another live domain (Yes we did search and replace of all urls etc) and the page template data, although clearly inside the sql data, with matching page id’s etc. is all in tact, NO template data is showing on any of the pages.
Any ideas as to why this would happen.. Please help.

Topic

[Jason Bobich]

Hi,

The key question is how did you do search/replace of the URL strings?

[meikam123]

standard method.. in plain text editor.
Every other site I have migrated works perfectly.. Everything else in the theme works perfectly..
for example on all pages there is plain content in the WP editor as well as the builder.. the WP content is visible but not the builder data.. although it is in the database..
Why.. ?

[meikam123]

Please let me as soon as you are able.

[Jason Bobich]

All right, so don’t panic, this is a very common mistake people make. You’ll need to do your database transfer again. WordPress stores all of your complex data (i.e. large arrays, etc) as serialized data in your MySQL database. So, if during your transfer process, you’re manually messing with the data inside incorrectly, you’re going to lose much of this serialized data throughout your database.

If you’ve done this in the past with other WordPress sites and not had issues, it’s possible you’ve gotten lucky in that none of your key data was serialized. A common one people run into (just in general with any WordPress site) is the widgets — You transfer your site, you use the text editor to find/replace all the URL’s, everything seemingly works except you notice a lot of your widget data is missing. So, you put the widgets back manually and move on with it. Well, in this case, the issue is more noticeable because all of the Layout Builder elements are serialized meta data.

So, at the point you’re at now, there’s no way to get the data back other than to go back to the original, MySQL backup you made (before you edited it).

Now, when attempting to do any find/replace of a string in your database, this is a really great tool you can use to avoid any issues like this. The way it works is you just upload the PHP file temporarily to the root of your site. Then, go directly to that PHP file in your web browser and just follow the steps. When you’re done, delete the file from your server.

http://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/

Make it your common practice to use this (or something else that accounts for serialize data) in the future, always, no matter what theme or plugins you’re using. You can find other more fancy WordPress tools advertised to be an all-in-one migration tool, but personally I like to do everything manually and use this script. Here’s a more full article I’ve written on the subject:

http://www.jasonbobich.com/web-design/moving-wordpress-to-a-new-server/ (you can see the note about your issue on step 2 that I added a few years ago)

[meikam123]

Thanks Mate! Will try.. If you do not hear back from me then I will have solved it with this!
Cheers

[Author]

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