Move WordPress From One Site To Another

I am in the process of building a WordPress website under a domain that I no longer want to use (it is not a good name for what I am now doing). I got a new domain name so I need to move the site over from the old to the new. What is the right way to do this? Obviously, I am the admin of the site.

I was going to copy the files down to my PC and the upload them to the new site. This seems like an extra step. Can I copy and paste from the old to the new?
Thanks.

Great question becuase this is something that comes up more frequently that you might think. In fact, this is EXACTLY what I do when I create sites for other folks. I create the site on a test domain that I use and once it is satisfactory to my clients’ desires, I then copy it over to their domain name.

Ahhh… if it was only that easy 🙂

For the true, ‘Official Answer’ from the folks at WordPress, you can read, http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress.

If you don’t want to read all that, just remember a few things. When I say that I copy the site over to the new site, there are 2 parts that need to be transferred. The first part is to FTP all the files to the new site. Once the files are there, you have to move the MySQL database over to the new site. Within the database, all the comments, the posts, the pages, and all the content. Just remember that since you are moving the database from the old site to the new one, you will need to change some of the data in the database to reflect the new site.