Robert Stockwell

The only reason I can think of for why it would keep redirecting is if the site links in the database are still pointing to your old site. If you’re absolutely certain they are all correct, you may have to hire a developer or have someone else on these forums weigh in. As far as public links on your website, those might be stored in the theme files if changing them in the DB didn’t work.

I hope someone can find out what’s going on for you, but I’m personally out of options to suggest. I’m sorry.

I would start by installing a new instance of WordPress on your MAMP server. Then download the entire database via phpMyAdmin and the “wp-content” file folder. Nothing more or less. Replace the “wp-content” folder on your MAMP server with the one you downloaded from your host.

Next, you’ll need to edit your .SQL file so WordPress will work on your localhost install. Open the file with a program like Adobe Dreamweaver or TextEdit. Then use search and replace to search for “www.wardandsmith.co.uk” and replace it with “localhost”. Do not include the quotes, http, or any leading or trailing slashes. This is very important for data integrity and consistency. Save and exit the file.

Finally, login to phpMyAdmin to access your database. You’ll see there are already tables listed there; these relate to the fresh installation you performed on your MAMP server. Select all the tables and drop them. Then import the .SQL file you downloaded and just edited.

At this point, you should have a working local copy of your site on your computer. If links are saved in your theme’s files, it might take a little work to get them to work properly, but it will give you a good sense for performance issues.

If you still see a lack of acceptable performance, you can try a different theme, deactivate plugins, etc. until performance improves.

I would try to restore the backups you have, even if it means losing some of your work. I do not recommend migrating DB tables between WP installs. Among other things, it will look for file paths that will be different from the original installation, likely causing errors.

You were advised correctly that you should be using a hosting provider in the area you’re serving, but it’s much more of a performance and latency concern than SEO, although there may be SEO benefits as well.

I don’t know what your budget or business model is, nor do I know how comfortable you are with different levels of server administration. I’ve gone through 3 hosts before I reached my personal favorite: DigitalOcean.

I’d actually recommend them for you as well, based on the fact they have datacenters in London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. You’d probably use London most of the time, but you have global options.

As for your theme, it can’t be totally ruled out. You could copy the site onto a localhost server on your computer and see if the performance issue persists. If it does, then it’s likely a theme scripting issue; if not, your host is to blame.

Another thing to note about DigitalOcean is they charge by the hour of use (up to a maximum monthly fee), so you can try it out (maybe on this site?) to see how it works. If it doesn’t work out, worst case scenario is you’re out a dollar or two. Here’s some of their info:

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/compute/
https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Robert Stockwell.

First of all, the site looks awesome! Very professional design ??

It appears like you are indeed on shared hosting (based on some domain tools available on the web). As a matter of fact, you are sharing the same server with 168 other domains. As such, you are at the mercy of the traffic load of other sites.

In this case, you are you can optimize your heart out but doing so will only speed it up by a few seconds and thus won’t speed it up enough to counter the visitor patience issue. I’d strongly suggest moving to VPS, Dedicated, or Managed WordPress hosting.

It doesn’t surprise me that replacing the files didn’t do anything to fix it. I’d every dollar I have that the issue lies somewhere in the database.

What I mean by the different table types is sometimes WordPress will create it’s own tables with a certain type (e.g. InnoDB) while some plugins will create its tables with a different type (e.g. MyISAM). Combining two table types in one database will generally causes errors in WP. I had this exact same issue and found there was a mixture of two table types. Everything else (names, values, etc.) all looked perfectly fine.

I wouldn’t change any of the folder names in htdocs. I don’t think it would cause this type of issue, but it’s generally not a good idea.

I’d start by going into phpMyAdmin on the destination site/server and looking for the wp_options table in your database. Make sure the “siteurl” and “home” values are both set to “https://www.grotunnels.co.nz” (without the quotes and without a trailing slash at the end of the URL). If you currently notice the URL in your address bar changes to your old site when trying to login, this change will also likely fix your wp-login loop issue.

If the links for the pages in your theme are set in the database, changing them all at once is relatively easy. Download the SQL dump file from phpMyAdmin and open the dump file in a program like Adobe Dreamweaver (Notepad or Textedit will also work for this purpose). Then, use find and replace and ‘find’ all instances of “www.ridgewood.co.nz/grotunnels/wordpress” and ‘replace’ them with “www.grotunnels.co.nz”. It is VERY IMPORTANT not to include HTTP/HTTPS or any trailing slashes, as this will cause errors in other areas of the database and ensures data consistency.

Let us know if this works for you.

Changing your password via the database is fine as long as you know what you’re doing (which I’m assuming the OP does). Just make sure you “hash” whatever value you choose as the password with MD5 (you can Google how to do that; it’s quite common).

In addition to renaming your themes and plugins folders, also check that your database tables are all of the same type. This often happens when moving a WordPress site from one location to another and/or when plugins create tables with conflicting types of the ones WordPress has already installed (for instance, mixing InnoDB and MyISAM tables in the same database.

Let us know how things go!

Yes, I have. I ultimately called GoDaddy and explained the situation. They were nice enough to swap out the Windows Server with a Linux one with Apache (nginx, soon!) Thanks for your help.

-Robert

Thanks, Shannon.

Another important thing to note is that my new server runs Windows Server 2012 with IIS (yes, I know cPanel/Linux/Apache are “best”, but I have my reasons for setting it up this way. Thus, there is no .htaccess file.

As this is a relatively simple site, I just decided to rebuild this one. If nothing else, it’ll give me more experience with theme/code development.

That said, there are some other sites I’d like to move over..

Any other suggestions?

Thanks @nikhilnaik,

Unfortunately, the problem I was having was not sending a registration email, it was configuring the registration process so no email would ever be captured from the user. I ended up figuring it out on my own. I used Ultimate Member to manage users/registration; it provides an easy user management system and doesn’t require users to provide an email to register.