Essential WordPress Plugins Series: All-in-One WP Migration

Servmask’s All-in-One WP Migration plugin has been absolutely indispensable here at Webfix. Here’s why:

“Master Themes” and Beginning a Project

Part of our development process is to maintain a “master” theme — a bare bones WordPress theme pruned down to the simplest possible level while still retaining all of our preferred layout structures, common CSS preferences, etc. This provides a solid, consistent foundation to build each project on, and saves us a great deal of time.

Thanks to this powerful (yet beautifully simple) tool, beginning our work from this helpful starting point is just a matter of installing the plugin and importing our most recent export of the master theme.

Migration

Since we work on all of our client’s websites in a development environment before going live, All-in-One WP Migration plays a crucial role in migrating these sites to their new installations. Every setting, every plugin, every file in the custom theme, and every little shred of content in the database is retained exactly — something that is otherwise very difficult to achieve. Advil probably hates Servmask, because they’ve prevented thousands of headaches with the ease and exactitude of their plugin’s migration function.

Backups

In addition to migration, this plugin is a very useful backup tool. Since every single file and the entire database is accounted for, All-in-One WP Migration allows us to to save a complete snapshot of our projects in different stages, which is essential when you’re working on projects that require multiple tiers of custom development.