I created a Wordpress deployment and new VM. I made the VM’s IP address static. Then I created an instance group, and Loadbalancer with a new IP address (also static), Classic SSL Certificate and healthcheck. The backend was set to connect on HTTP port 80. I pointed my DNS @ and www records to the Loadbalancer’s IP address and the SSL cert became active. I set my WP host and Site URLs to my https://mydomain.com. The loadbalancer was working fine (healthy) and I could browse to my new default WP homepage and homepage/wp-admin.
Using Duplicator Pro in WP-admin, I migrated my old site to the new GCP WP instance. The migration completed, but my Loadbalancer’s healthcheck was no longer healthy and the site was no longer responding via the loadbalancer’s IP. I used phpMyAdmin, via the VM’s IP address, to confirm and alter the Wordpress Home and SiteURL values. I tried changing the HOME and SiteURLs to HTTP. I tried changing from mydomain.com to the Loadbalancer’s external IP address, the internal 10.128.0.5 address, etc. but could not get to my site via the loadbalancer. The healthcheck remained unhealthy.
I tried deleting and recreating the loadbalancer but could not get the healthcheck to become healthy.
I finally deleted the loadbalancer altogether, deleted the Classic SSL cert, pointed my DNS to the VM’s IP address, and set up SSL on the VM using my old site’s Sertigo SSL cert. As soon as I did that, I was able to successfully get to my migrated site on the VM and it is a perfect migration.
Any idea, pointers or debugging steps I can take to determine why the loadbalancer would work fine with the default Wordpress installation but fail once I migrated my old site?
Thanks.