How To Transfer Your Website To Another Hosting Provider
Let's say you have a website just like
this but you want to move it to another web hosting provider,
how do you exactly do that? Well in this video, I'll show you two methods how to
migrate a website from one web hosting provider to another
completely free of charge The first step I highly recommend you do
before you migrate delete any caching plugins that you
might be using. Some web hosts have native caching so
you might have compatibility issues later on.
These include like WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed Cache and so on. But with that out of the way let's continue to
the actual tutorial. I have a website hosted on HostPapa with
a domain tech2stream.online and now I want to transfer to this empty
Hostinger website.
Log into the WordPress panel of the
website you want to move elsewhere. Go to plugins and add new, search for
"All In 1 WP Migration" install and activate it. In your WordPress dashboard
you'll now see an additional button it's going to be called
all-in-one wp migration. Hover on it then choose export. You'll now need to
click export to and choose the file option, this will
take a while depending on the size of your website.
Once this compression is done just click the download button
and save it somewhere to your computer. Keep in mind, that this only works with
websites that are smaller than 500 MB in size. The first
half of your migration process is now done
you've extracted all of the necessary files from your web hosting provider to
your computer.
It's now time to put all of those files
onto the new web hosting provider. Log into the web hosting provider that
you'll be migrating to and create a clean WordPress installation.
Log into your newly installed WordPress account and install
"All In 1 WP Migrate" plugin again. However,
the upload limit is just 64MB now but
my file is 72MB. I'll show you how you can raise this limit up to 500MB
for free. So, visit this link click on download and
save the file somewhere on your computer. Go back to your WordPress control panel
and in the plugin section click add new then upload plugin. Click
choose file, navigate to the folder where you saved the file and click on it.
Then click open. Next click install now and wait a bit.
Once the plugin is installed click activate
hover over the plugin but this time instead of clicking export
you'll want to click import. Choose import from file and
navigate to the file you've exported earlier. You'll now need to wait a bit
for the upload to complete But once the upload is done click
proceed and wait a little bit more.
One last step is clicking save
permalinks structure. Don't worry if you need to log into
WordPress again since you just migrated all of your old files to your
new web hosting provider now you need to use your old WordPress
logins to reach your website. You might also need to confirm your
email on your first login. Once you're inside WordPress again just
choose "Post Name".
And click save changes and now if we
would visit our new website tech2stream.com
everything is updated and working correctly. Okay but what if you don't
want to use a new domain name you want to use the same old domain name that you
already have well what you need to do is you need to
go to your domain name provider and update the name servers to point to
your new web hosting provider. This process is generally different for
every single web hosting provider but in my example I'll show you how to
do it on Hostinger. It should be similar enough on every
single other web hosting provider as well.
Basically, if you buy a domain name from a provider like Bluehost, SiteGround,
GoDaddy, Hostinger, Namecheap basically anywhere that sells domain names
you'll have access to what's called a DNS – The Domain Name
System.
Currently, my tech2stream.online website is pointing to the HostPapa
servers. If I want for the same domain to instead
use my Hostinger hosting I'll need to change this value. So, I just need to press use default and update now both
tech2stream.com and tech2stream.online will go to my
Hostinger website not the HostPapa one. It doesn't really matter where you bought your domain name as long as you
have access to the domain name system you could use your domain name on any
web hosting provider.
For example, you could buy a domain name
on Bluehost and use it on SiteGround. or buy one on Namecheap and use it on
Hostinger as long as you have access to the domain name system and you can point
the servers to the right web hosting you're good to go.
I'll now show you how to manually migrate your website and that means
not using any plugins.
So, we're not restricted by the 500MB upload
size and that means this works for any sized
website. Okay as you can see here I have a
website hosted on HostPapa with the domain
tech2stream.online and now I want to transfer to this empty Hostinger website.
First I'll log into my HostPapa cPanel account and access the file manager.
Next, I'll go into the folder that all of my website files are located in
it could be named like your website or just public_html.
You're looking for a folder that has all of these WordPress files in it.
Click on select all and then compress.
Choose
zip archive, let's name the file website – transfer
and just press compress files. Click the newly created zip file and
download it to your computer. I now have half of my website saved to
my computer but obviously for a successful migration
you need the full website and another major component of the
website is the database. So now, I'm going to show you how to
extract the database to your computer go back to your control panel but this
time instead of going to the file manager
you'll want to access PHPMyAdmin since I have multiple websites hosted on
HostPapa there are several databases here as well.
To know which one belongs to which website you
can check the wp-config file.
You'll find the config file in the file
manager next your website files. Just click on it and
then click edit and edit again. As you can see this
website is connected to great642_wp717 database.
So, that's the one we need I'll now go back to PHPMyAdmin since
I know which database I need and click on it.
Scroll down to the bottom click check all then go into the export tab and
click ok.
So now, I have all the necessary files
required for a successful migration stored onto my computer
it's now time to move all of these files onto a new web hosting provider
where our website will sit. Again I'll be using Hostinger as the new host
just because I have a couple of plans on here that I'm not using at the moment.
And if you want to get yourself a Hostinger plan I'll leave a link in the
description down below first thing you'll want to do is create
a clean fresh install of WordPress on your new host.
If you would go and visit your domain name right now you should see a
completely empty and basic wordpress website,
let's start moving over the files from our old website to this new one
starting with the databases. If you're like me and you have multiple websites
hosted on one hosting provider it's going to be hard to tell which
database is linked to which website so we'll need to check.
Navigate to the
file manager of your new host and open up the wp-config file here we
can see that this website is connected to this
database. Once you know the name of the database you
need you can go into PHPMyAdmin and start editing the correct database.
Access it click on check all and then choose drop.
Don't forget to click yes. That means this database is now completely empty,
I'll now upload all the database files into this new one.
Click import and choose the SQL file that we created from our old web hosting
previously. And then import it into this new
database. Now, we're going to do a very important step
where many people fail when migrating their websites. And this all depends if
you're going to use the same domain name or a new domain
name for your website that you're migrating
if you're using the old domain name you don't need to do anything with the
databases but if you're using a new domain name
it's very important that you update the database with new information.
In your newly imported database there's a table called options,
click on it as you can see it holds 2 values.
Site URL and Home.
If you're going to use a new name with your website like I will
update those two values here. If you have an SSL certificate installed on a new
domain use HTTPS if you don't use HTTP.
Once this database stuff is taken care of we'll need to upload our old content
into our new site So, go to the file manager and first of
all save the wp-config.php file to your
computer. By doing this you'll need to do less
editing later, then click select all and delete everything that
was created with a clean WordPress installation. Upload a zip file
that you've made previously from your old web hosting provider
you'll now need to extract that zip file and delete it because
it's not needed after the extraction is complete and the more useless stuff you
have on your website the slower it's going to be.
Once the
extraction is completed delete the wp-config.php file
and upload the one you saved previously. Since all the files are now uploaded to
your new web hosting provider all you need to do now is connect the
database with the content of your website.
Click on the config file in the file manager and press edit
then scroll down until you see table prefix.
This value is for your new database, However
since you uploaded your old database you'll need to use the old prefix
to find the old prefix you need to go into PHPMyAdmin and log into the
database as you can see here the prefix we need
is wpk0_ and that's exactly what
we'll type into our wp-config file once updated click save and close and
now if everything is working correctly you can
visit your website and the transfer is now
completely done. The absolutely last step you need to do in order to make sure
everything is working smoothly is sync up the domain names this is if
you're now using a new domain name instead of the old one like I did in
this tutorial inside WordPress download a plugin
called "Go Live Update URLS" and once you have it installed and
activated go into tools then go live scroll down type in your
old and your new domain names and click on
update URLS.
This will sync up every single URL that
has been mismatched by the transfer process.
If you don't want to use a new domain name and you want to use the same old
domain name that you already have that's definitely possible all you need
to do is not make any changes to the database when it comes to the site URL
and home sections and you'll also need to update the name
servers from your old web hosting provider
to your new one i talked more about this and how to do it in this
section of the video. So, try re-watching it if you still don't know how to do it
and of course you can always ask for help in the comments down below
I help out whenever possible. And that pretty much covers it
these were my 2 recommended methods of migrating your website for free
one for smaller projects and once for bigger projects my name is Emit and I
do a lot of web hosting related tutorials
and reviews so if you're a webmaster and you're interested in that sort of
content consider subscribing and as always good luck making your websites.
websites you.
