Disappearing Blocks (when URL is updated)

I’m a developer who has picked up a customer with a previously installed wordpress site. I’m having an odd problem. Site is using a purchased template “ProGreen”. I received a zipped copy of the entire site, including a backup .sql file. I was able to install the site at a different hosting. The person who originally set up this site created some pretty clever page builder options, generally using a lot of work and good application of the shortcode examples. The finished results look good, BUT all the data entry for static pages is in the page builder on the theme. The data fields on the pages are empty. When you change themes you get nothing. sigh. I could probably live with that. Static is static… but.. the developer hard coded the sites URL / subdirectory tree everywhere. Not a good technique. Relative paths are your friend. I installed the site as received, but obviously lots of things didn’t work. I did lots of sql searches and replace things where appropriate. Site is running, barely.

What I thought I’d do is take the original copy of the .sql backup file and replace all of the ‘https://practicesite.com/practice_location/” with a simple “./” (and yes I am aware of the “http:\\/\\/practicesite.com\\/practice_location\\/” encoding as well. ) I can do the replace thing (there are over 500 observations) , upload the .sql, rebuild a second copy of a database, and swap that database in. When I do that however, for some weird reason, I totally lose ALL of the templates custom page builder tools. The blocks disappear. The tool content get blanked out. Site loads up and normal pages work fine, but those pages with custom page builder parts (block elements) are just missing the content. Its very odd. I can’t tell if those fields are located in a file at the old site, or exactly what’s going on. Anybody have any ideas on where to look?

Many thanks, Zip.