Remove Bedrock and go back to Vanilla WP

One of my clients need to remove their bedrock-files and go back to “Vanilla WP”.

Their website is on a shared hosting and the environment was done by previous developers.

Is it safe to go back to vanilla like this? (their live website is quite big so we need to do as little as possible with certain things and need to do it through FTP sadly):

  • Remove composer and composer.lock from root dir

  • Copy the directory (with files) /wp-includes FROM /wp/ to root /

  • Copy the directory (with files) /wp-admin FROM /wp/ to root /

  • Copy the files that are right inside of the /wp/ to root /

  • Replace wp-config in root, with a new one (that follows the vanilla wp structure, updated with the current db details of the website)

  • Remove all files from /mu-plugins in /wp-content/mu-plugins (related to bedrock)

  • Then I will go to their database and remove /wp from the siteurl inside of wp_options

I hope this is okay to ask here. I’m happy to get some confirmation on this if possible. I have installed bedrock but never gone back to vanilla like this before.

I have tested it out on my own server and it seems to work but I’m not fully sure if there will be something missing when you use it like this.

Some ideas:

  1. Whatever you want to do: First take a backup from the site. Also check whether you can actually completely restore the site from the backup.
  2. Install a staging system that mimics the production system as close as practically possible.
  3. Install a vanilla WordPress on that staging system without Bedrock (composer).
  4. Import the backup into the now “vanilla” WordPress site. This is also a nice way to check whether the backup can actually be used for restoring the site. With importing backup I mean the WordPress site database and uploads/ folder - which is basically the WordPress application state.
  5. Install the plugins manually or using a plugin that helps with installing the plugins.
  6. Concerning the theme installation: When it is a Sage-based theme you may want to package it as a ZIP file and install it the classic way. These build scripts may be useful.

You’ll also need to do a find-replace in the database for media URLs (or anything else that was in app/uploads and moved to wp-content/uploads).

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