Migrating from wpengine to localhost and thereafter

There might be some reasons to move the wordpress website created in wpengine.com to another hosting. From the Backup points, there is chance that you will miss Media Library and get just blank wp-content folder.  For this, you need to access SFTP of your website on wpengine.com. SFTP port is 22, unlike FTP which is 21.

To bring out wordpress website out of wpengine.com, you need to get wordpress content and the database.

Part 1: Extracting website content from wpengine.com

1. Log into https://my.wpengine.com/ with your admin privileges.
2. In the Dashboard > Installs, click on your selected website. You will be shown an IP for your wordpress install. Note that IP.
3. Under the section SFTP Logins, make a note of username and the admin password.
4. If you do not remember the password, just create another login by clicking on Add Login button on the right side.  Remember!! you should login with admin privileged account to do this action.
   1. In the next screen – Add New SFTP login to <|your_site|>
   2. enter the userid and password required.
5. Make a note of complete username back in the Overview screen. User ID will be prefixed mostly with your website name.
6. Launch Filezilla or other SFTP supported client and connect to the IP address with the User ID and password on port 22.
7. You will be presented with the folder for your website. Download the folders from there.

Part 2: Extracting Database from wpengine.com

There is phpMyAdmin interface for your website. You can export database from there.

1. Log into https://my.wpengine.com/ with your admin privileges.
2. In the Dashboard > Installs, click on your selected website.
3. From the menu on the left side, click on phpMyAdmin link.
4. Select the database from left side and click Export button from the right side.
5. Select Custom as export method and select output as Save output to file.
6. Leave other options with default values and click Go button.
7. A .sql file will be downloaded.

Part 3: Setting up localhost

1. Create a virtual host, or virtual alias according to your website, on localhost (or development environment).
   [See virtual host creation on Apache webserver]
2. Create a mysql database in your local environment and create a user id to access that database.
   [See database creation using mysqladmin or phpMyAdmin]
3. Go to wp-config.phpfile of your SFTP downloaded content and update the host, database name, user name and password accordingly.
4. Launch /wp-admin/ URL of your local setup from  a browser and login with the wp-admin user id created on your wpengine.com install.
5. Go to Settings > General and change the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) values. These two will affect the links within posts and pages.

That is it. WordPress website from wpengine.com is now in your localhost.

Before publishing to public access on your selected hosting service, make sure any of the links do not point back to wpengine.com. Though it seems to be daunting task, it is worth putting efforts to check each and every link.