Best way to migrate a single site from WP network?

Hi Peter,

Unfortunately, extracting a single site from a multisite backup isn’t a current feature of UpdraftPlus. It’s one there has been some interest in, and we do want to look at in future. The best thing to do would be to register your interest here: https://updraftplus.com/make-a-suggestion

Best wishes,
David

It’s possible to migrate a site from multisite to a single site install with a couple of extra steps…
The concept of multisite has evolved some and is now a standard WordPress install that’s activated as a “network” install, so any core/plugin/theme files should be the same across your network.

So! With that in mind, you could export your themes, mu-plugins and plugins and ship those out as-is, provided you only have the themes/plugins installed that are required.
The WordPress core really shouldn’t be sent…because it’s WordPress. Instead, just have them start from a clean WordPress install, which I can almost guarantee will be easier. The interesting part of this is it will negate the need to change wp-config or htaccess from multisite back to single site. To be safe, deactivate all plugins and activate one of the default WordPress themes prior to trying any of this. You’ll also need to have a database and a clean WordPress install set up on the new site and have the database name and the site address. These need to match what’s in wp-config.php for the new site. This is not optional.

If core, themes and plugins are taken care of, you’re really only missing uploads and the database. For uploads, you can download a backup of your uploads, then just extract out the folder in /sites named the number that relates to the site ID number you want. You can then zip up that single folder’s contents into its own file named uploads.zip.

The database is the only tricky part. The easiest way is to go into phpmyadmin. The tables you need to export are going to be prefixed with the site number of the site you want. Select only those tables. Here, the site has an ID of 5:

• wp_5_commentmeta
• wp_5_comments
• wp_5_links
• wp_5_options
• wp_5_postmeta
• wp_5_posts
• wp_5_term_relationships
• wp_5_term_taxonomy
• wp_5_terms

You’ll also need to include any special tables created by plugins/themes as well. The good news is those tables should also have the wp_5_ prefix. Note that I didn’t list _users or _usermeta, as I don’t find them helpful for a migration. It contains all users across your network and I’d rather just attribute all posts to a single (existing) user on the new site.
Export example:

Once you have a .sql file, you can open it in any text editor that has search & replace.
Search wp_5_ and replace it with wp_
Search your original site address and replace it with the new address. Example: search wp.5.wordpress.org and replace it with wp.wordpress.org
This address is usually only in the wp_options table, but plugin/theme tables can also have it.
Save and re-zip the file, naming them with the new database name.

You’ll send over plugins.zip, themes.zip, uploads.zip and newdatabase_wp.zip. With these files and a clean WordPress install, they can either be unpacked and manually uploaded via FTP or restored as zip files using Updraft. The database should be imported last and can be imported using either Updraft or phpmyadmin’s import option.

This isn’t nearly as complicated as it first appears. :)

Hi,

I’m afraid UpdraftPlus cannot migrate a sub-site into a Multisite WP install.

Regards,
Bryle