Moving WordPress to a Subdomain

1. Setup a new subdomain with cpanel or add an A record for the main domain.
2. Download the original database
3. Extract the database with a zip tool like Winrar, if necessary.
4. Open the database file in a text editor like Notepad++ or Gedit.
5. Do a search and replace for the old url and replace it with the new one. For example, search for http://example.com, http://www.example.com and replace this with your subdomain like newsubdomain.example.com
6. Do a search and replace for absolute paths like /home/username/public_html/example.com and change to the new path like  /home/username/public_html/newsubdomain.
7. You can look for hard coding in files too. Your editor can do a find / replace for all files or you can use the Linux command line. The command ‘grep -H -r “www.example.com”  /home/username/public_html/newsubdomain’ will serach the new subdomain for www.example.com.
8. Create a new database and dump (import) the updated ‘.sql’ file.
9. Change the database settings in wp-config.php.

If the url grew by 13 characters (example.com became newsubdomain@example.com), you can change numbers like ‘s:55’ to new amount of characters. For example, in wp_options you may have an option_name like theme_mods_templatename where ‘s:55’ needs to be changed to to new amount of characters for the long absolute url lengths. Essentially, all instances of ‘s:55’ will now become ‘s:68’.

Now, the website should display properly.