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Design Cart Migration

Design Cart Migration is a free WordPress and WooCommerce database migration plugin featuring Smart URL replacement, SQL export, JSON handling and safe dry-run.

by Paweł Nosko · github.com/designcart/design-cart-migration · website

★ 0stars

Install

Download source zip No release zip yet

This is the repository archive. It installs, but the folder name will carry the branch suffix and updates will not flow.

Install straight from GitHub with WP-CLI:

wp plugin install https://github.com/designcart/design-cart-migration/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
No built-in updater. New versions won't appear under Dashboard → Updates. Install new releases yourself, or let Git Updater track the repository.
Readme github.com/designcart/design-cart-migration ↗

Design Cart Migration 🚀

Migrate WordPress and WooCommerce databases without spending hours manually fixing broken URLs.

Design Cart Migration is a free, open-source WordPress plugin designed to solve one of the most frustrating problems developers face when moving websites between environments: old URLs hidden inside complex database structures.

Traditional search-and-replace tools work well in many situations, but real-world WordPress and WooCommerce migrations can involve much more than replacing plain text.

URLs may be stored inside JSON objects, PHP-serialized arrays, nested structures, associative array keys, or strings containing escaped slashes.

And sometimes, even after a successful migration, references to localhost remain scattered throughout the database.

That's exactly why I created Design Cart Migration.

🔗 Official Plugin Page – Design Cart Migration

👨‍💻 About the Author – Paweł Nosko, Design Cart

💡 Why I Built This Plugin

For years, I used Better Search Replace when migrating WordPress websites.

It's a useful tool, but during some complex WooCommerce migrations, I repeatedly encountered URLs that required additional manual corrections.

For example:

http://localhost/shop
http:\/\/localhost\/shop
https://localhost/shop
\/\/localhost\/shop

Sometimes the old URL appeared as an associative array key rather than a value. Other times, it was hidden inside JSON embedded in PHP-serialized data.

Fixing these cases manually was repetitive, time-consuming, and unnecessary.

I wanted a tool that understood how WordPress plugins actually store their data.

So I built one.

✨ Key Features

🧠 Smart URL Replacement

Automatically handles common URL variations, including:

  • HTTP and HTTPS protocols

  • Trailing slashes

  • Protocol-relative URLs

  • JSON-escaped slashes

  • Common escaped URL representations

  • Longest-match-first replacement

🔄 Recursive Data Processing

Processes supported nested data structures instead of treating everything as plain text.

  • PHP-serialized arrays and structures

  • JSON objects and arrays

  • Nested JSON and serialized data

  • Associative array keys and values

  • Regular text strings

📦 SQL Export with URL Replacement

Export your WordPress database with URLs already converted to the destination domain.

No need to import the old database and then run a separate search-and-replace operation on the destination server.

⚡ Live Database Replacement

Replace URLs directly in your current WordPress database.

Includes a dry-run mode to preview changes without modifying stored data.

📊 Table Selection and Progress Tracking

  • Select individual database tables

  • View approximate table sizes

  • Select or deselect all tables

  • Exclude large tables (10 MB or more)

  • Monitor SQL export progress

  • Review per-table replacement results in Live Replace

🛡️ Additional Controls

  • WordPress administrator permission checks

  • Nonce verification

  • Optional GUID replacement

  • Confirmation before live database changes

  • Batch-based database processing

Always create a database backup before performing live replacements.

🛠️ Two Ways to Migrate

Feature SQL Export Live Replace
Smart URL replacement ✅ ✅
JSON processing ✅ ✅
PHP serialization handling ✅ ✅
Associative array key replacement ✅ ✅
Table selection ✅ ✅
Optional GUID replacement ✅ ✅
Dry-run preview — ✅
Downloadable SQL file ✅ —

🚀 Installation

  1. Download the plugin ZIP archive.

  2. Open your WordPress administration panel.

  3. Navigate to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.

  4. Install and activate Design Cart Migration.

  5. Open Migration in the WordPress admin menu.

  6. Choose SQL Export or Live Replace.

📋 Requirements

  • WordPress 6.2 or newer

  • PHP 7.4 or newer

  • Administrator privileges

🎯 Who Is It For?

Design Cart Migration is particularly useful for WordPress developers, WooCommerce store builders, freelancers, web agencies, and administrators who regularly move websites from localhost to staging or production environments.

The plugin focuses on database migration and URL replacement. It does not automatically transfer WordPress files, media, themes, or plugins.

❤️ Built by Design Cart

Design Cart Migration was developed by Paweł Nosko, founder of Design Cart, as a practical solution to recurring problems encountered during WordPress and WooCommerce migrations.

The goal is simple: spend less time fixing old URLs and more time building better websites.

🌐 Read the full project documentation on Design Cart

👨‍💻 Meet the author – Paweł Nosko

📄 License

GPLv2 or later.

Free and open-source software.