How I Moved My WordPress To Another Host

So yesterday, I promised to write a post on how to move your WordPress blog or any site for that matter to a new host. I guess this post could be relevant at this time of the year, as one of my favorite things to do during this time is to introduce people to blogging and the easiest way is giving out hosting. Some have their own hosting, but choose to change ships and if you are one of those, this post will be relevant to you.

For this post, I’m going to focus specifically on migrating your WordPress blog over from one host to another host. I’ll cover the more general technique of transferring your blog over to another blog. Then, I’ll cover a really straightforward option possible in the case the control panel your web hosting company offers you is cPanel.

Moving Your WordPress Installation

To move your blog over to another host, the two things that you want to backup are your wp-content and your MySQL database. To backup your wp-content folder, it is pretty straightforward. Just download the folder through your FTP client and you’re done.

Backing up your MySQL is a little more complicated. Login to your phpMyAdmin and select the database that has your WordPress installation. With the database selected:

1. At the top, click Export
2. When the page loads, at the left side in the Export box, there will be all the tables in your current database. Click Select All to select all the tables.
3. Underneath, among the radio buttons, there should be one labeled SQL. Select that.
4. Under the SQL section in the right, tick the settings: Structure, Add DROP TABLE, Add AUTO_INCREMENT, and Enclose table and field names with backquotes.
5. Then right below, tick Save as file. Once you save it to your computer, you’re pretty much done backing up.

Now, putting it back online.

1. Download a copy of WordPress from WordPress.org. Extract it and except for the wp-content folder, upload everything.
2. Then, update the wp-config-sample.php file to a database you have created in your new hosting account.
3. Upload the wp-content folder you backed up to your blog’s root directory.
4. To restore your MySQL database, login to phpMyAdmin and choose a database you wish to restore your tables into.
5. Then, click Import, Browse, select your SQL file, and click Go.
6. You should be all set then.

Super Easy Way If You Use cPanel

If you have cPanel and your new host uses cPanel, simply click Backup and backup the Home directory and the MySQL database. Then, in your new hosting account, simply use the Restore wizard, click Browse, and select your backups. Done!

Conclusion

When I changed hosts, I utilized both methods. I can confidently say that both methods work very fine. If you do try one of the two methods and get stuck somewhere, feel free to contact me and I’ll try to help you out.

How do you successfully move your blogs over, as not all hosts are always perfect? Any migration episodes to share?