Moving WordPress to a New Hosts (server)

Comprehensive guide from a developer with real-world examples and scenarios. So let’s see typical cases of website migrations from one server to another with popular providers.

Typical situations:

• Moving from the client’s host to the agency’s host ( and back)
• Moving from one provider to another because of pricing/support/speed etc.

No matter why you’re moving, nobody likes downtime. The trick is to get everything set up and tested on your new server before you actually make the move official.

What are the actual steps to switch hosts?

 Set up new hosting environment

Basically, it means having login and password at your hosting provider website and probably shared hosting access, because for VPS setup there definitely should be another guide. Depending on your site needs – variety of hosting plans will work, just don’t go with the cheapest. In vacuum I’d go with Hostinger cloud hosting or WpEngine

Both have great speed, a friendly admin panel, and great support.

On this phase you should NOT:

• Change DNS
• Change Name Servers
• Point domain to new IP address, however you can copy the IP into your notes already

Set up blank wordpress

Create an empty wordpress website using temporary domain provided by your host. It will be long automatically generated domain, where you should see default wordpress theme for this year.

If hosting does not provide 1-click installation, you’ll need to drop the wordpress.zip folder with file manager into the public_html directory ( may vary, better to check into hosting docs or live support) and unpack it there

In this case, you’ll also need to create the database in phpmyadmin and visit your temporary domain /wp-admin to setup the website connection with database using login, password to the database and it’s name

Install WordPress migration plugin

As a developer, I have no intention to manually migrate the website and don’t know why you would consider that, so let’s stick to plugins. Here is list of common solutions on the market:

1. All in one WP migration
2. UpdraftPlus
3. Migrate Guru
4. Duplicator

If you like or use others – Ok, we use the free version of UpdraftPlus, and it’s working well for us and agencies who outsource wordpress development to us.

And when your migration plugin is installed follow next steps:

• Install and activate migration plugin on production environment
• Make a copy of website and download the files to your computer
• Upload into temporary URLs migration plugin
• Start the Migration

By the end you should see fully working copy of your production website, but on a temporary domain

Set TTL (time to live) to the minimum

On your old server, with the production domain you will need to set your DNS Time to Live (TTL) as low as possible. This will give instruction not to cache DNS for too long, so website visitors will see the live website as soon as possible. Reach out to hosting support or check docs if it’s not clear where you can change the TTL

Final Step – Change the internet DNS

Update the DNS to point to your new server, and in a couple of minutes, everything will be done. Use Chrome Dev Tools to verify the host change is made. And old environment can be deleted or be used as test environment.