move from local development to live server

hi – i dont know what i am doing wrong and maybe somebody could help – i am moving a working wordpress site to a live site and i am getting this error

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp() in /var/www/vhosts/blissbeauty.ie/httpdocs/wp-load.php on line 17

any ideas- i simply copied the site from my local folder up to the public html folder on the server and created a database ( same details as local db) – i also adjusted “siteurl” and “home” in the options table via phpmyadmin to the new url

believe it or not i have successfully done this at least 4 times already this year so i dont know what im missing but if anyone has any ideas i’d be gratfull – have been looking at it for 2 hours already