Problems moving to root

Hi

Please be gentle. I am new to WP, this is my first proper WP site, have made a thousand basic errors, am suitably contrite and ready to learn.

OK, so finished building the site in a subdirectory and decided to move it to the root but leaving core files where they were.

Realised that having built it in a directory called /blog was foolish as the site also has a /blog. Create new directory /newfolder (ftp).

Deactivate caching plug in. Change siteURL and wordpress files to /newfolder Export wp files, back up database. Download all files from /blog (ftp), then move to new directory on server in root aka /newfolder (all except for no reason I can discover except my fail an /upload/sucuri file but I doubt this is causing what followed)

Remove all existing files from root to a backup file. Move htaccess file from /newfolder and also index.php. Leave everything else in /newfolder

Endeavour to load site. Hit multiple problems. Index.php is trying to pull files from siteurl not home. Error connecting to database. wp-admin goes into a redirect loop (have no redirect plug-ins running). Cannot get into wp.admin either.

Go to phpmyadmin and double check siteurl is root and home is /newfolder. However, the source code clearly shows it is trying to pull everything from root, where there is nothing except index.php (is it the right one? . it doesn′t say silence is golden) and .htaccess (same question).

Right now, the site looks an absolute mess and my head will be on the block Monday morning. Can anyone assist, please?!

Site should be https://www.expressworld.co.uk but clearly isn′t all there.

Many, many thanks. Have a great weekend!