How to transfer WordPress to another server?

My mind’s made up. You’ve had enough of the silly hosting or cosmic costs of its maintenance and finally you decide to move the site you’ve placed on WordPress. How to move WordPress to another server? What do you need to remember and how should you prepare for it? Migration of WordPress to another server is not as difficult as it might seem, and with our guide it’s a real porridge with milk.

Moving the website to another hosting and the dangers associated with it

Let’s start by specifying the type of risk you have to take into account when moving WordPress to another server. Inaccurate browsing through the site’s files and its incorrect porting may result:

• loss of data and files;
• temporary exclusion of a page, store, portal or service placed on WP;
• loss of potential customers and brand or company image losses;
• lowering the position of the website or store in the search engine SERP.

As you can see, an incorrect transfer of a page to another server may be costly. Therefore, if you are planning to migrate and change your domain or hosting, you need to prepare yourself properly and arm yourself with the necessary knowledge.

Of course, just migrating WordPress to another server is not so terrible. However, before taking the first step of the migration you should be aware of the dangers and their potential implications.

Ready? Here we go!

But, but. Wait a minute. Are you sure your website needs WordPress?

Before moving WordPress

The operator sent you a cost estimate for the renewal of the hosting or domain, which raised the pressure on you and finally motivated you to move your website, store or domain to a cheaper service provider? Or maybe your motivator was constant fuckups, hosting failures or poor support?

If you want to move to a new hosting, you should first thoroughly verify the market offer of the service providers, so that you don’t get caught up in raspberries again.

Carefully review the offer of service providers, check their guaranteed parameters of shared hosting, VPS servers or dedicated servers (depending on the type of service you are aiming at), and check if a great offer of host providers is not too great by chance. Often, the biggest players on the market resort to small print and ravens, which dramatically change the profitability of their offer and – well – simply mislead customers.

Aside from unfair practices and the very issue of profitability of offered packages, carefully verify the hosting parameters. The key parameters include: disk capacity, type of drives on which the hosting is based (HDD, SSD or NVMe SSD), number of monthly transfers and restrictions on the number of databases, e‑mail accounts and domains. In addition, verify the frequency of backups and SSL certification.

With us you can choose between 4 hosting packages that they offer:

• from 10 to 100 GB of NVMe SSD space,
• from 100 GB to unlimited transfer,
• from 10 databases, e‑mail accounts, domains to an unlimited number of them,
• backups every 30 days,
• free SSL and HTTP/2 certificates,
• effective and comprehensive protection against malware.

Check out the full offer of hosting in Thecamels!

Okay. Hosting selected. What now?

You can move WordPress to a new hosting in 2 (or even 3) ways: automatically using the WP plugin or – if you like challenges – manually. You can also use our free help.

Be sure to read: How to perform a periodic review of WordPress?

Changing the page domain in WordPress

The very change of a domain name in WordPress is trivially simple. Just go to the general settings of WordPress from the cockpit and enter the new domain name in the fields WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL).

Now you have to connect the domain in cPanel to the hosting management. It is also necessary to replace the addresses generated by WP in the database. For this purpose you can use Better Search Replace. plugin. Install the plug-in and in its options replace the address of the old domain with a new URL.

Check also:

• How to choose a plug-in for WordPress?
• Forbidden and prohibited plugins for WordPress

WordPress transfer using plugins

Noble plug-ins, how much you have to value, this one will only find out who migrates WordPress to another server.

There are several useful plugins for WP that will automate the transfer of a domain and blog, store or company website to new hosting. One of the most popular is the All-In-One WP Migration and Duplicator plugins.

All you have to do is download and install the plug-in on the old and new CMS, then from the administration panel (cockpit) of WordPress you will go to the plug-in menu and click Export.

In the displayed view, click on the place where you intend to export the page files. You can transfer them to your hard drive, FTP or Google Drive, OneDrive, Amazon S3 and Dropbox. I recommend that you choose File and compile all the page files into one file with the extension .wpress.

Download the compiled file, then go to hosting with new WP configuration and select Import in plug-in menu. Upload the previously downloaded file, wait for the plug-in to rewrite it, accept overwriting and voilà – you just moved the page to a new server.

Now just update the permalinks (direct addresses). Go to the settings section of the new WordPress and then click Direct links. Select the permalinks option from the list and save your changes.

Read also: How long does it take and how does the migration of the website proceed?

Manual WordPress migration

If you want to transfer the WP manually, you must:

• export copy of MySQL database to new hosting
• transfer a copy of files from the old server using FTP
• update the wp-config.php file
• redirect the domain to a new server

Sounds like a lot of work, right? Indeed, manually moving databases and files requires more effort and requires you to access your FTP account and database on the server via phpMyAdmin.

Step 1: Export a copy of the MySQL database

You can export the database using the phpMyAdmin application. You can use the ssh command to do this:

Note: the command will work if you have a root and your database is called wordpress.

Import the SQL file created in this way into a new hosting by typing a similar command into ssh console:

Step 2: Copy files

Log in to the FTP account on the old hosting and copy the site’s files, then upload those files to the FTP account on the new hosting. Remember to back up your website files before migrating to the new hosting.

Step 3: Update the wp-config.php file

Now go to the file wp-config.php. The file is located in the main WP folder. Open the file with a text editor and enter the information about the new database to which the WP is to connect.

You need to edit 4 items in the file:

• define('DB_NAME', 'database');
• define('DB_USER', 'user');
• define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password');
• define('DB_HOST', 'host');

Step 4: redirect the domain to a new server

The last step is to redirect the domain. You can do this by redirecting it using DNS addresses.

Don’t you have a head for it? Take advantage of our help

Are you afraid that moving WordPress to another server is too difficult for you or you just don’t have time for it? Use our help We will take care of everything from A to Z – we will move your website and mail for free!