My 7 Step Guide Moving a WordPress Site:

When your website host is becoming to expensive, their support are almost non existent, you are exceeding your limits regularly, your website is limited or even taken offline for minutes if not hours it is time to find a new website host in the very competitive market out there.

To find a new website host is relatively easy, but I do advise you to do your home work properly. Many of them offers you a very low price and come hosting renewal time you might be in for a big surprise. I personally recommend Arvixe and you can also look at IX webhosting. They might not be as well known as Host Gator or Go Daddy, but their pricing and support service is way better.

If you decide to get a new website host it means moving a wordpress site to the new host. Migrating wordpress sites should not be a difficult process and after spending hours to google what to do, I finally found the following 7 step guide moving a wordpress site to be easy and accurate.

You found your new host; you signed up and paid your hosting now it is time moving a wordpress site to a new host.

Step 1:

At your current host log into your Cpanel, Go to File Manager, find the domain name you want to transfer and click on config.php and then edit as indicated on the image.

A new page will open and you will find your Data Base (Db) name as per image below.

Now that you know your DB name it is time to download it to your computer. Make a folder on your computer where you can easily find the files that you have downloaded later. To locate your Data base you need to go back to your Cpanel and find phpMyAdmin

Click on phpMyAdmin and a page that looks like this will open:

Find your data base, in this case koosvj_wp28 click on it and all the tables for the specific DB will load. Click Check All in the bottom. It is time to complete step 1 of moving wordpress site to new host. Scroll down till you see Compresssion. Make sure that you select the zipped before exporting.

Click on export, go, then save the file to the folder you have created on your computer

Step 2:

You have successfully saved your wordpress website’s data base on your computer. But there is other content on your current website that you want to transfer to your new web host. I found by far that the easiest way to download your wordpress content is to use a FTP program such as FileZilla which by the way is free. Just download to your computer and connect it to your current and future host.

Open Filezilla but also open the folder where you have saved your data base as per step 1. Mine is “Transfer businessonlinekoosvj.com”

Click on the domain on the right hand side that you want to transfer – my one is Business Online – and all the files for this website will open. Find the wp-content file and drag it to the left to the folder where you have saved your data base, or right click and download it to your transfer folder. This may take a while depending on the content you have on your website.

Congratulations. You have downloaded to your computer all the info required to transfer wordpress site to new host.

Step 3:

Login to the Cpanel of your new web Hosting Company. Click on Add On Domains to add your domain to your new web host. Do the same if you are using a subdomain as I do with Businessonline.koosvj.com.

At Arvixe the page to add your domains and subdomains look like the image below. But all webhosts will look similar and the actions to add your domain or subdomain will be the same. It is also advised that you add your domains and subdomains to the public_html.

Step 4:

You now have your domain and or subdomain added to your new webhost. It is time to load wordpress to your website. At some hosting companies they allow you to load wordpress directly and at others you can make use of software services such as Softaculous.

To simplify transfer a wordpress site to a new host I highly recommend that you use the same username and password when loading wordpress on to your domain or sub-domain of your new host as the ones you used at your old host, because that is what is downloaded on your Data Base. If not it can get tricky to change your username and password in the data base and our aim is to do the transfer as easy and smoothly as possible.

Step 5:

When wordpress is loaded onto your domain you will get an email with the new data base(DB) details because that is what you need to upload your data base from your computer. If you do not get the details just follow the steps as described in step 1 to get your Data Base name. In my case my new data base name was koosvj_wp270

You have your data base name so at your new host’s CPanel click on phpMyAdmin and find your data base name on the left hand side.

Click on Check all and select Drop.

This screen will follow – Click on yes and your data base will be empty. It is very important to ensure that the data base is empty before importing the data base of the wordpress website that you are moving.

Click on import and then browse

Find the data base from your old host on your computer.

After your data base has been uploaded click on GO

You will see a page that says import has been successfully finished.

Step 6:

Now our data base is in place. We need to get the content from Our website on the old host to our website on our new host.

With Filezilla or which ever FTP program you use connect to your new host.

Once connected to your new host find the domain on the right hand side of Filezilla and the file wp-content that you want to transfer on the left hand side

Highlight the wp-content file that you want to upload and drag it to the right hand side to your domain’s files or right click and upload it to the domain on the right hand side.

You are overwriting wp-content files that have been created when you loaded wordpress to your domain so you will see a screen like this:

Click on always use this action to overwrite the files currently in your wp-content file with the files from your website at your old host. You have now successfully transferred your website from your old host to your new hosting company.

Step 7:

All that is left to do now is to point your domain name to your new hosting company in my case Arvixe.

To point your domain to your new hosting company you will have to log into your account where you have registered your domain. Locate your domain and click on it.

The will see a screen that looks like this:

When you bought hosting at your new web-host they sent you an email that will have your new name servers in. At Arvixe it will be something like below.
Domain DNS Information

“If you did not purchase your domain name from us, please login to your registrar (the company that registered your domain name for you) and use the following information to alter the DNS settings on your domain name: (Note: Many providers do not require the IP address information)
Domain Name Server 1: ns1 xxxxxxxxxx
Domain Name Server 2: ns2 xxxxxxxxxx
Domain Name Server 1 IP: 162.xxx.xx.xx
Domain Name Server 2 IP: 198.xxx.xx.xx”

When you click on manage above screen will pop up and you can copy and paste your new name servers in the spaces provided. Click save.

If your domain registrar keeps a DNS Zone file of your domain it is a good idea to also change the IP address there to the IP address of your new host. Note not all registrars provide this information but I will show you an image of how to do it below.

And that is it. Sit back, relax, and wait (usually around 24-48 hours) for the re-delegation to propagate around the internet.

Very important – Once your site is live on your new host log in to your dashboard, go to settings, permalinks and click on save to ensure that all your links has transferred properly. Do a test on a few to ensure accuracy.

Good luck with your move.(iX Webhsosting is running a special now- Grab it while it is hot)