Recently I had to migrate my WordPress site from one host to another and it turns out it was a lot easier than expected. In this article, I will share how to do it the easy way.
This will not be a normal article but I would like to share the process anyway so that other people will know that it actually isn’t as difficult as one would expect.
There are many good reasons to migrate your WordPress site to a separate host. My main reason was that another host was able to get me a much better deal than the current one I was on. So I started researching the subject of moving my WordPress blog to another host.
Migration Guru to the Rescue
There is a plugin called Migration Guru available for WordPress which does all the heavy lifting for you. Find and install the plugin in the plugins section.
Prerequisites
In order to get started, you will need WordPress installed and available on both your old and new host.
I ran into an issue here due to the Migration Guru plugin complained that my domain was not found, even though it was online. The reason for this was that I had received a temporary domain with a tilde (~) sign in it, which was not ok.
I solved the domain issue by migrating my domain first to the new host so that I could target that one rather than the temporary domain.
So, before you can migrate, make sure the target has a proper domain name.
How to migrate with Migration Guru
Activate and open the plugin on the source (old) host. Enter your email and press migrate.
Next, you will be able to select a target host, the host that you will want to migrate to. As of writing this, the following hosts are available.
As for me, my blog is now running on Bluehost so I selected that.
In the next section you will need to enter some information such as destination URL, server address, cPanel username and password. The destination URL is the URL of your target host. I had already migrated my domain, so in my case the target was thecuriousdev.org. The server address can be found in your cPanel of the new host, and the cPanel login details you should know.
And that’s it! Press migrate, and Migration Guru will perform the migration for you which includes copying all the database tables, and all the content.