Importing Issues (Staging -> Production)

Hi everyone,

So in the last few days I encountered some odd issues that I’ve never experienced before with the export -> import feature. In the past it just all went, well, smoothly. No issues. In the last few days, that was sadly not the case. Let me give a short recap of what I’m experiencing:

• Export looks ok, no errors during the process
• Importing took 3-4 attempts to get right.
  • One attempt yielded jumbled HTML/CSS which looked nothing like the original
  • Another 2 attempts sorta got it right, but either the images were off (I did select replace links and import media), or the layout was
  • Fourth attempt worked, mostly – good enough
• The main issue, which a colleague at work pointed out today, was that some of the pages he was going to had broken links. As it turns out, this was the most concerning issue for me.
  • Apparently with the importing process, 90% of the site links were had a jpg link inserted into them.
  • For example, what should have been website.com/myurl was now website.com/wp-content/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/10593695.jpegmyurl
  • This obviously caused a massive amount of panic for me. Merry Christmas for me, I guess?

So I managed to fix the url insertion issue with Better Search & Replace, but would anyone know what would cause such an issue? And more importantly, how do I avoid this kind of thing in the future, because it makes the entire export/import process a bit nerve wracking.

If it helps, I’m on the previous version of WordPress (not the latest, because that’s caused a whole slew of other issues which I won’t get into on this post) and using the latest version of the Salient theme.

I look forward to hearing your assessments and recommendations.

Cheers, and Happy Holidays!