title: Moving staging wordpress blog to live
body: <p>[EDIT] I have attempted to re-phrase this question since I feel it is an important one and it has the potential to simplify what may otherwise become a nightmare process. The fact that this has had a few down votes suggests that perhaps the more established "Wordpress professionals" do not quite fathom the fundamental difficulties that novices face and the complex solutions that may otherwise be avoided with a bit of planing.</p>
  
  <p><strong>My original question:</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>I have built a WordPress site and theme on a staging domain with the intention of replacing my current domain.
  
  So new site lives at staging.example.com
  
  And I would like to move this to the live URL www.example.com
  
  Ideally with as little downtime as possible.
  
  Is there a simple way to do this?
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Background:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I need to update my Wordpress website to a new look and feel and a general database update etc. I did not wish to hand over admin access to my live site to a developer and therefore created a sub-domain: staging.example.com for them to work on. </p>
  
  <p>On completion, I had to figure out how to get the new site onto the live domain.</p>
  
  <p>I was not sure how to do this:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Was there a built in tool to do this?</li>
  <li>Did I need to clone and import?</li>
  <li>If so, what clone and import tool to use?</li>
  <li>etc.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I would imagine this will become a common problem for people as Wordpress matures and the process I eventually followed was incredibly painless however not documented anywhere... </p>
  
  <p>I hope this post helps other people in a similar position to me.</p>