Why a simple WordPress domain swap can silently break your entire database

Changing a WordPress domain via plain search-and-replace corrupts the database because WordPress stores data using stacked encodings — PHP serialization, JSON, and raw strings — all nested within single column values. PHP serialization embeds byte-length counts alongside strings, so replacing a domain with one of a different length invalidates those counts, causing unserialize() to fail and affected page elements to render blank. Page builders like Elementor worsen the problem by storing JSON inside serialized PHP, and json_encode() escapes forward slashes by default, meaning a URL search can return zero matches even when the URL is visibly present in the row. The correct approach is to fully decode each encoding layer, replace values only within leaf strings, then re-encode each layer while preserving the original escaping conventions. Skipping any of these steps risks silent data loss that does not surface as an error but simply causes layouts, widgets, or options to disappear.