With such fierce competition in almost every industry, businesses feel obliged towards providing their users with a premium website experience in order to scale their profits.
Arguably, The most important factor affecting your customer’s experience on your website is your web hosting.
Due to the substantial technical knowledge required to choose the best hosting provider for a particular website, webmasters often end up choosing the wrong provider. Soon enough, they find out that they have unmet requirements that can be fulfilled at another provider. Hence, they feel the urge to migrate their website to the better hosting provider in order to improve their site performance.
However, as simple as it may seem, migrating to a different provider is in itself a crucial task that demands attention and timely execution. If executed uncarefully, it can go horribly wrong.
That is why, today we are going to discuss the best ways to migrate a WordPress website efficiently.
What Is Migration?
In simpler terms, migration means moving a WordPress website from one hosting server to another. So basically, all the content on the website is copied to another server. Once the migration has taken place, you can delete the content on the older server by yourself, or the host would do it themself once the subscription expires.
Why People Migrate Websites
There are plenty of reasons why someone would want to migrate their website to a newer host. Here are some of the more popular ones.
- Performance
There are different kinds of hosting servers available out there, and the cheaper ones are shared among hundreds and thousands of other websites, which adversely affects the performance. So, one would want to migrate to a better and private server to ensure better performance.
- Cost-Cutting
Contrastingly, if a website owner wants to cut down some additional costs, they can migrate from a more expensive hosting server to a cheaper one.
- Change Domain Name
People often want to change the domain name over time, especially once their business starts expanding and targeting more people. With a change in the domain name, businesses sometimes look to experiment with a different hosting service.
- Customer Support
A great factor when it comes to changing the hosting server is the poor customer support by the current host. People want a hosting company that is always there to help and support their clients.
- Launching New Websites
Businesses often make a full-fledged website locally and then later migrate it to a different online server rather than launching a website with minimal text and basic design.
- Migrating Test Sites
Test websites are the exact copies of the live sites to carry out experiments without the fear of negatively affecting the live website. So, whenever the owner is satisfied with the test website, they can migrate it to the live website.
How Can You Migrate A WordPress Website?
There are three main ways you can migrate a WordPress website, with each one of them requiring different time, money, and expertise. You can either
- Migrate with a new host such as BionicWP
- Migrate with a Plugin
- Migrate Manually
Let us now look at each of them in a bit more detail.
- Migrate With BionicWP
BionicWP offers its clients completely hassle-free migration services. Our migration process is fairly simple.
-Sign up to BionicWP
-Fill the migration form from here or by clicking on the “new site” button from the header navigation.
-Our engineer would migrate the site for you and email you once the process is completed.
In case you have any further queries please feel free to get in touch with our support team at support@bionicwp.com.
- Migrate With A Plugin
There are plenty of plugins used for WordPress website migration. However, you need to choose a reliable plugin to ensure seamless migration, as not all of them offer the same experience. Some of the issues with unreliable plugins include the following:
- It causes downtime while migrating
- Migration might fail
- It might not support your new host
So, choose a plugin wisely if you decide to use one for the migration process.
- Migrating Manually
Lastly, you can migrate a website manually, but it is only recommended if you are well aware of the ins and outs of a WordPress website and have the required expertise. Also, keep in mind that this method is very risky, and it is not recommended at all to try it if you have little to no idea of what you are doing. It may break your live website or even fail the entire migration.
On the other hand, if you are confident about your skills, take the following steps to migrate your WordPress website manually.
- 1) Download WordPress Files
First of all, download all the WordPress files using one of the following ways:
- Through an FTP client
- Through the cPanel
FTP CLIENT
- Download and install the FTP client such as Filezilla on your personal computer. It will help you get access to public_html on your computer directly from the desktop.
- Then, enter the FTP credentials into Filezilla, which you can obtain by asking from your hosting service provider. Once you enter the credentials obtained from your host, Filezilla will establish a connection with your server, and then you will be able to download the public_html folder.
- This folder should appear under the Remote site section under the top-right panel, which you can right-click on and select download.
- Once done, all the WordPress files will be automatically downloaded to your personal computer.
Also, keep in mind that the public_html folder is the default folder for all the files, but many website owners change the location for security purposes. So, clarify this with the website owner before you do everything.
cPanel
- Go to the cPanel after logging in to your old hosting provider. Once done, find the public_html folder in File Manager, and you will see all the WordPress files stored there.
- Then, right-click on that folder and press Compress.
- Once done, right-click on the folder that was just compressed and press Download.
That’s it! All the files will start downloading on your personal computer.
- 2) Download WordPress Database
- Open phpMyAdmin by logging into your current hosting account.
- Once you log in, you will see your WordPress databases on the next page on the left side panel. If you see a single database, continue to the next step. However, if you find multiple databases, contact your hosting provider and ask which database
- Once you find the database, select it, and you will notice some options on the top bar. From there, choose Export > Quick > Go.
Once done, the database will start downloading and be stored on your personal computer.
- 3) Create a new Database Users & Create Space For New Database
Once you have the database and all the WordPress files saved on your personal computer, let us now prepare to upload them to your new hosting service provider.
- Go to cPanel and choose MySQL Databases by logging in to your new hosting account.
- Then add a new database and press create the database.
- Then, scroll down and create a new user on the same page.
- Then scroll further down and link the new user and database together.Make sure that you note down the username, password, and database name somewhere safe, as you would need them in the next step.
This database that you just created would be empty. It is just creating space for the old database you downloaded on your personal computer so you can upload it.
- 4) Point The Configuration File To The New Database Space
You need to edit the config file before you start uploading the old database and files to the new hosting provider so you can point the WordPress files from the old database to the newer one. Here is what you need to do.
- The public_html that you downloaded previously, open it.
- Once you open it, locate the config.php and open it.
- In that config file, you will find the user, password, and database name.
- Now, you need to replace them with the newer user, password, and database name that you noted down earlier.
- Save the changes you made and exit the config file.
- 5) Upload The Older Database To The Newer Database
- Open phpMyAdmin after logging in to your new hosting account.
- You will see the new database that you created earlier in step 3 on the left side of the screen. Select it.
- Then select Import on the top of the database and upload the older database that you previously saved on your personal computer.
That’s all you need to do with the database. Let us now see what you need to do with all the WordPress files.
- 6) UPLOADING THE OLDER WORDPRESS FILES ON THE NEW HOSTING SERVER
This process can be done in similar ways as downloading the old WordPress files. You can either do it through:
- An FTP client, or
- Your cPanel
Also, make sure that before you upload the old WordPress files in the public_html folder, there is no previous public_html folder already present in the file manager. You can look for it by logging in to your new hosting account and going to cPanel > File Manager. If you see a public_html folder, delete it right away. It is possible that your hosting service provider might have auto-installed it, or you might have installed it when you purchased the account.
FTP CLIENT
- Open and connect Filezilla with the new hosting service provider just like you did previously in step 1 earlier.
- The top right panel will appear empty once the connection has been made. Then, you need to upload the public_html folder here.
- To upload, click on empty space and then select the public_html folder. Then, right-click on it and press upload.
Then all the content that is present in the folder will be uploaded to the new server.
- 7) Change The Old URL To a New One If You Wish So
This last step is optional. Many of you might not be only migrating to a new hosting server but also a new domain name. Now that you know how you can migrate to a new server, as we explained in the previous steps, let us now see how you can change the older URL to a new one.
- Download and install a plugin named Better Search And Replace and open your website using the older URL.
- Then choose Tools > Better Search and Replace.
- In the “Search For” option, type the older URL.
- In the “Replace With” option, type in the new URL.
- Press on Run Search/Replace at the end, and you’re all done!
Some WordPress Migration Tools To Help You Out
Migrating a server by yourself is a pretty technical job. However, here are some of the tools that can help make the process a bit easier and convenient.
- WP Engine Automated Migration
- Duplicator
- WP Migrate DB
- All-In-One WP Migration
- WPvivid Backup Plugin
All of these tools are the best ones online that can help you out significantly.
Post-Migration Measures
Once you have successfully migrated your website to a new hosting server, you need to take the following steps to ensure that your website is working fine.
- Firstly, you need to clear your cache with the help of a cache plugin. If you don’t have a cache plugin, you can remove your browser cache.
- Then, open all the pages on your website and go through them to ensure that nothing is malfunctioning and all the images and ads are appearing just fine.
- If you find something to be broken, contact your hosting provider immediately and ask for solutions!
Migrate Your Website To BionicWP
Here at BionicWP, our main goal is to ensure that your life remains easy. Therefore, we provide our clients with a dedicated plugin that helps in easy migration. So, if you are ready to migrate your website to a better hosting solution such as BionicWP, contact us right now and choose a plan that suits you the best. Then, sit back and relax, let our team of engineers migrate your website.
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