How to move Publishing Sites in SharePoint 2010

Recently I had a need to take a copy of a number of publishing sites and to recreate them on a new Web Application. Unfortunately with SharePoint creating Site templates of publishing sites although possible is not supported and doesn’t fully work when creating a new site from the template.
But in SharePoint 2010 the backup and restore functionality allows for granular backups which can be carried out at site or list level with the Powershell commands ‘export-spweb’ and ‘import sp-web’ or Central Administration for exports.

The process I followed for copying a publishing site is with the following steps

1. Take an export of the site either through Powershell or through Central Administration.

2. Now in another web application, in the same or new Farmthe new blank Publishing site. So if you are moving a travel site to a new Web App then create the travel site first as you would normally using the same SharePoint Site template.

3. Then import the content and configuration, from the export file earlier, into the newly created Publishing site. A simple command I used included the –identity and –path

‘import-SPWeb -identity http://intranet.contuso.com/travel -path file://servername/backups/travel.cmp

Fairly simple and straight forward but a requirement is to ensure the new site is the same standard Site Template as the old site otherwise errors occur. A point of note in testing a site with multiple subsites (11), an export created three.cmp files numbers incrementally. But as long as they are together on the import this will create all the site structure although navigation settings may need tweaking.