I hear this question more than anything in my career. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small mom-and-pop company or an incredibly large distributor the idea of migrating a website comes up. And with the idea comes the terror and fear of losing everything! To think of the hundreds of posts and images that could be lost to the digital abyss if something were to go wrong.
Thankfully these days it’s quite easy to migrate your WordPress website to any hosting provider with ease! Follow these easy steps below to outline how to migrate a site from host to host or dev to live.
You heard me. Go and backup your WordPress site. This should become second nature for any WordPress user to make sure we have a solid backup to revert to in the event anything goes wrong. Don’t have a plugin to backup your site? No worries! There are a plethora of free plugins available to allow you to create a complete backup of your site. The one I like to use is All-in-One WP Migration.
While this is primarily a migration plugin ( conveniently the one we will be using later ), it does provide the ability to create backups and download them. With one of the premium add-ons, you can even export directly from the website to AWS S3, Dropbox, or Google Drive. It’s also worth noting that if you have a larger website (the community version is limited to 512M ) or a multi-site, you may be required to complete a one-time purchase to access unlock these features.
To back up the site, download the All-in-One WP Migration Plugin and activate it. It will show up in the main WordPress sidebar, where we will need to select backup. The interface is incredibly clean and simple, simply click the “Create Backup” button and wait for the site to finish backing it up. This can take a few minutes, so go enjoy a cup of coffee/ Redbull. Once that completes, you can either move or download a local copy by selecting the download icon on the backup line.
In my experience, the free is generally sufficient when working Oxygen Builder and WordPress to minimize the number of files called during load. Thus keeping the total file size to a minimum across the board.
Let’s start by installing the All-in-One WP Migration plugin on both the current server ( let’s call this server A ) as well as the target server ( server B will do nicely ).
We will start with Server A, by selecting the Export option under All-in-One WP Migration in the sidebar. Here we can add criteria to our backup file or submit it as is. Generally, when doing a simple migration you may not choose to change anything as we are looking to clone the site from one place to another. However, because we can use this process to migrate from dev to live it can be helpful to add URL redirects or restrict data/files/posts from moving over.
Let’s assume this is a simple migration and we will leave it simple and create our export.
We will simply click the ” Export to ” option and select “File “. In this list, you can see the number of backup options the plugin has to offer. Now it’s waiting time again. You just had some coffee, so maybe do some push-ups? Or more coffee, I don’t judge. You will be ready to proceed when you see the following button pop up indicating the export is complete. Click this button to download a copy of your site to your computer.
Now that we have all the power in our hands, if you decided to ignore my backup warning this might be a good time to do that as well. I cannot stress how many times in my career backing up has saved me from having to repeat hours of work. It’s a great habit to have. Also, consider putting backups in multiple locations. One of the many reasons I enjoy this plugin personally is the ability to create a local backup, a backup to my S3 storage, and my dropbox. There is even an option to do this automatically!
Now back to the mission at hand, we’ve captured a stand in place copy of our WordPress site so now we need to log into Server B, and this time we want to select Import. We will be greeted with a simple page that allows us to select import and select a location from which we want to pull the file. Let’s click the ” File ” option as we did with export and locate the local Download file we saved from Server A. The standard naming is domain name – date/time – hash key – .wpress. this may be different depending on if you changed the file name. After we select our file, the import will begin and start unpacking the export file to Server B. This again may take some time. This time, do some jumping jacks. Or take your dog for a walk.
After a bit of time, it will finally finish and greet you with a couple of last items to do in order to finalize the migration. It’s critical that both of these be completed. The first is to go to Settings > Permalinks and save the links. I like to do this twice just to make sure it’s done properly. The next thing you will want to do is clear all local cache and CDN.
You did it! Seriously! that’s it. From here we just need to go and re-activate any plugins that may be exclusive to one site at a time. Accidents do happen, however, so take a few moments to look over Server B and make sure the image and links are coming up as intended. Sometimes additional tweaks can be required due to code/plugin restrictions.
If everything looks good, now it’s time to change your DNS to point to server B so Server A can retire successfully. I hope this guide was helpful in guiding you through the WordPress migration process. In the event it didn’t, let me know and I can gladly lend a hand!
My tried and true method to migrating WordPress sites, databases, and all assets to any other hosting environment. I hear this question more than anything in my career. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small mom-and-pop company or an incredibly large distributor the idea of migrating a website comes up. And with the idea comes […]