There are lots of ways to migrate a WordPress site. Lots of plugins can do it. You can do it over simple (S)FTP. But the quickest way I know of is via rsync and WP-CLI. But that does come with an important proviso: you need to have access to a shell (via a simple local terminal or SSH) to both ends of the migration. And that’s often harder to do than the plugin or SFTP route. But if you’ve got that, this way is a great deal faster.

There are a lot of prerequisites if you’re trying to find this method safe and easy. Mostly, you need to be comfortable with a command line enough that you already have at least a little understanding of what SSH, rsync, and WP-CLI are. And you need those installed and working on both ends of your migration. If you’ve not aleady got that, unfortunately this Quick Guide is too quick to detail those for you.

If you do already have that set up, then this video should do you:

And if you prefer text, here are the details:

Moving a Site From Remote to Local With rsync and WP-CLI