These platform plugins are designed to ensure a world class experience on our platform, however, many of them will not work if your site is moved to a different, non-WP Engine environment, like a local development environment for example.
Here is the suggested workflow for copying your WP Engine site to another environment:
- Create a backup within the my.wpengine.com user portal – instructions are available here. Once that backup is completed, you’ll just select the backup that you just created and click “Download Zip”. (Note that the Zip will not include your uploads directory, so if you need those, please download them using SFTP.)
- Once you receive the Zip file, you will open the file and delete the following
- wp-content/mu-plugins/mu-plugin.php
- wp-content/mu-plugins/wpengine-common/
- wp-content/advanced-cache.php
- wp-content/object-cache.php
- Upload the rest of the files to your other environment
- Import the database found in wp-content/mysql.sql from the zip file, to your other environment
- Edit your wp-config.php file to reference the new database connection details
After that, your site should be up and running on your new environment!