How To Migrate WordPress The Easy Way

Doing anything technical with WordPress can be a scary prospect, so much so that you end up putting it off rather than messing it up completely. But moving hosting companies or to a different hosting package with the same company doesn’t need to be one of those things.

Firstly you will need cPanel to move any further forward. Most hosting companies will have cPanel and it might be something you are already comfortable in navigating around from setting up emails or updating your PHP version. There are plugins that will help migrate hosting, but most will want you to buy the premium subscription version to unlock certain features.

By following these 6 easy steps, moving WordPress is a breeze.

Step One

Firstly we need to export the current database, this is found in PHPMyAdmin. On a side note if you only have one WordPress install to move, this is likely to not apply to you but in some cases, you might only have one CPanel install which deals with multiple domains (Add on Domains). So in your PHPMyAdmin you might have multiple Databases down the left hand side. If this is the case you’ll need to read your WPConfig file, found in WP-Content. This will say which database relates to which domain / WordPress install.

Step 2

Next we need to grab the WP-Content folder which has all of your, themes, plugins, and media in. The best thing to do here is to compress the folder which will make it a .zip file then download it. Depending on how much data is in this folder will affect how long it takes to compress.

Once this is done, you can download your WPConfig file separately. The only thing that we really need to know is the table prefix. This is because when we do a fresh install of WordPress on the new hosting, we can specify the table prefix. If we enter the same prefix as what is currently in use, the import of your old database will be seamless; not specifying your old prefix in the new WordPress install will mean errors are encountered.

Step 3

Now on to the new hosting package, we need to Install WordPress. It is pretty simple, just make sure that you pick the correct subdomain, ie. with “www.” or without “www.”. Of course, most people are on HTTPS:// now (and if you aren’t, you should be!).
In advanced options, you’ll need to put your old/current database prefix in, don’t worry about the database name.

Step 4

Now we need to go into the file manager on CPanel, upload your old WP-Content.zip file, and extract it. Once this is done we would recommend deleting the .zip from the hosting folder as it is not required.

Step 5

Finally, you need to import your old database into the current database that WordPress is using, if you have matched your prefixes up then there should be no issues, and this is the last step. In the video below you can see that we now only have one CPanel managing multiple websites so we have multiple databases in there. So it’s important to know which database you are working with.

And that’s it! Once your A Record has updated which might take a few hours, you should have a fully functioning fresh install of WordPress, without the cost of having to buy plugins or tearing out your hair.

If you run into any issues, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!