Help! Migration is removing bricks layout

Hi all, I’ve got a big problem and was wondering if anyone could help.

I made a clone of my site on updraft and rebuilt it totally using bricks. I’m now migrating it to the live URL but am having issues with bricks.

It looks like bricks is not rendering its layout for 98% of the pages.
Oddly enough a few pages are rendering correctly.
In WP admin those pages that are rendering correctly have the bricks label next to it.
The rest don’t.
I’ve gone into one of the faulty pages that was built/rendering with bricks to see whats happening. All content is there but all the containers are missing.

Any ideas on how I could solve this, or what might be going wrong?

Hi Chaten, sounds to me like a possible caching problem - if no errors happened during migration.
Have you seen this post: WAIT: Bricks 1.4 Display and CSS Issues - #12 by timmse
You also need to re-save the permalinks in the wordpress permalinks settings.

Hi HeroRox, thanks very much but unfortunately this did not solve the issue. There is no CDN, and no caching issue and no permalink issue.

It seems like the changes made in Bricks on the test server is just not carrying over to the Live URL.

Any other ideas are still welcomed though as I’m stuck for now.

Did you run a db wide search & replace to update the local urls to live urls?

Hi Omega, Yep I did. Everything is working fine except for Bricks. I also tried reactivating the licence but that made no difference.

To be honest bricks also seems to be working fine but its just not carrying over all of the theme layout and changes that has already been set on test server.

With that in mind my best guess is that maybe the backup and migration procedure may be at fault or Bricks has some conflict with the way its being done.

I’m doing more testing to figure it out. …but any more ideas are still welcomed.

I have the same problem. Build an small site in one domain. Exported into a new domain (Zip of html directory, manual export of DB). ran a DB update to update the the URLs. Re-saved the permalinks. All the pages are listed. All the images are listed and I can see the images. All the plugins are listed. When I edit a page with bricks, a blank page appears, along with my menu header. The footer is missing. Out of 14 pages, only one renders in bricks and it is a page I built entirely with code. Looking at the postmeta table, I see records which describe attributes for bricks elements.

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I’ve been testing all day trying to fix. Whats worked so far is a fresh install of WP and then using Updraft Migrator to migrate the staging site into the new fresh install. Or even a manual migration would work.

I’m not sure if the order of how the migration takes place has an effect or not. eg. install database first then themes then plugin, but I am still testing.

I haven’t checked how Bricks store the data in the database. If it stores absolute url in serialized arrays then updating the url will cause the issue as the length will be different.

Yes. I can confirm this is the issue. Bricks is storing absolute urls as serialized values in post_meta. So you need to ensure that when you run search & replace in the db - you also update the serialized value length. Use Better Search Replace – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org

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Thanks Omega. I tried that already but the problem still persisted. What I’ve gone ahead and done is as described above. I did a fresh install of WP and then migrated with UpdraftPlus which also carries out the search and replace.

This worked for me.

The serialized values seems like it could be an issue but I believe it was done correctly every time I carried out the migration so I’m guessing that maybe there was some kind of conflict with my existing live site and the new one that was migrating over.

timmse had post his useful best practice here Best practice for migration - #7 by timmse

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@Conceptstore did you find any solution?

No sorry, I didn’t. I ended up just rebuilding each page manually. I have found this issue over and over again though, especially when using templates and transferring sites. It could be to do with the templates import/export option but I have not tested it.

The free “migrate guru” service / plugin avoided this problem for me. I do a lot of copying / backup / translation and really need a service not to rebuild pages manually. You can however also import/ export templates.