How to Migrate your WordPress site from One Host to Another Host
Deciding to migrate my sites from one host to another host was a not-so-fun experience. I couldn’t find very good instruction for an easy way to do this–which was what I wanted and needed. I am not experienced in coding websites, I just know how to build WordPress sites (using a lot of plugins, ha!). Now, after countless research and discussions with tech support, I wanted to post about what I did so others do not have to go through the same agony I went through.
I migrated my sites from a host I had been using to Bluehost, mainly because of price and good reviews of Bluehost.com. My other host was getting just too expensive and I liked the fact that if you select the premium hosting package at Bluehost you can host unlimited websites on your account.
This is the link they provided me to migrate my sites myself: https://www.bluehost.com/blog/wordpress/faq-how-do-i-move-my-wordpress-website-to-bluehost-1787/
I took one look at those instructions and thought….um no. I do not want to do it this way. Waaaaay too many steps.
So, this is what you do to knock this out quickly and easily.
First, create an account at https://orion.managewp.com
Then, backup all of your sites. They have a free option that will backup your sites once a month. In order to migrate your site, you have to upgrade for $2 just to clone your site.
First you want to switch over your nameservers for each domain to Bluehost (or whatever host you are migrating to). So go to where you own your domains and change your nameservers. Most of mine happen to be through GoDaddy.
After you completed that step, go back to your host you want to migrate your site to. For Bluehost, choose addon domain since you are adding on another domain to your account. They have a main domain when you first sign up for you and then every domain after is considered addon.
Create a new directory. My example here is mydomain123 (but you should use your domain name) In this case it is public_html/mydomain123
Now go into My Sites on Bluehost and create a site. It will create a new WordPress site for you to migrate everything into (even if your current site with another host is already WordPress). This is where I messed up at first–I had to redo everything because I didn’t create a site in the My Sites section. This is important if you want to manage your site right from Bluehost. You’ll need to select the domain from the dropdown menu that should now to pointed to Bluehost (now that you’ve changed the nameservers).
Now, you need to create a new database for your site under the Advanced tab. Click Advanced, then Databases. It’ll take you to My SQL Databases. Put in your domain name under Create New Database and press Create Database.
Now, scroll down and create a new user. I just used a number…I don’t really think it matters too much. Then, create a password.
Now, scroll down more and Add User to Database. Click on the dropdown menu and find the new user you just added. Click and add that new user.
Now, go back to your https://orion.managewp.com account. You need to activate the $2 monthly backup schedule because you will need to clone your site from one host to another host.
This is what you get:
- All free tier features
- Daily backup schedule
- On demand backups
- Backup to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, S3
- Clone & migrate websites
- Download backup archive
- Template Builder
From there, click on Clone website
Now, you have to choose the destination. You’ll want to choose New Website.
Now you have to put in destination site URL. For my example, I have mydomain123.com. Put in your destination domain. Click Test URL.
Now, this is where it gets tricky. I had a lot of back and forth with tech support over this step. You have to go back to Bluehost to get this info. For Host FTP, but in your domain name. Username will be your Bluehost username. DB name is the database you created in Bluehost earlier. DB Username is when you added the SQL. Keep DB Host as localhost. The password should be the one you created earlier. The installation path should be /public_html/yourdomain. It is the directory you created earlier. For my example, it is /public_html/mydomain123.
This worked for me! I was able to transfer 3 of my websites very easily over the Bluehost this way.