Internal links to staging

The scenario

The local site’s home links to the shop, to three product categories, to the About page and to a few products — in buttons, in navigation links, in the text. With the WordPress Importer alone, staging gets those links as they were: http://localhost:8909/product/…, so every click on staging leads back to a site only one computer can open. The fix used to be a search-replace after each import.

The steps

1. On the local site, Tools → Export: check the pages and products (and the menus, the widgets…).
2. Export, and on staging Tools → Import → WordPress with the file.

What the import does

When the import ends, the local site’s address becomes staging’s in what was imported:

• the content and excerpt of every imported item, new or updated — links in the text, buttons, navigation links (also inside block attributes, where the address is escaped as http:\/\/…), with http or https;
• the custom links of the imported classic menus;
• the widgets and theme mods that came in the file.

The address is replaced only where it ends: old.example never touches old.example.org.

What it doesn’t

• Content that wasn’t in the file: staging’s own pages keep their links.
• Templates and template parts aren’t exported yet, so links in a block theme’s header or footer stay as they were.