I needed to move a WordPress site to another server the other day to improve performance, so I thought I'd write down the steps in case others might find it helpful. Here are some simple instructions, please follow at your own risk (there's no lifeguard on duty).
- Access your domain manager and add an A Record to your DNS settings - I recommend ‘temp’. So, if your domain is example.com, you’ll add temp.example.com. To complete this step, you’ll need to know the IP address of the new server.
- Associate the new ‘temp’ version of your domain with the new server (may have to wait an hour or so for propagation to occur).
- Install WordPress on the new server to the ‘temp’ version of your domain
- Make a backup copy of your database (a SQL file)
- Upload the SQL file to the _db_backups folder on the new server (at the root level)
- Restore the database associated with the ‘temp’ version of your domain
- you may need to open your wp-config.php file and change the database references to match the newly restored database.
define('DB_NAME', 'your database name here');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'your database name here');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'your database password here');
/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'your database hostname here - it’s usually longer than the username');
- Try your site at temp.example.com - if it works proceed. If not, you may have to call your hosting provider for assistance.
- Login to the DNS manager for your domain and change the A Record for the primary domain (example.com) to point the ‘@’ record to the new IP address.
- Delete the ‘temp’ record.
- Login to the Hosting Admin for your old server and remove example.com from the associated domains
- login to the Hosting Admin for the new server (you may have to wait an hour or so to do this step) and associate example.com with the server. That’s it - wait for your domain change to propogate - you may see weird stuff for a couple of hours - be patient.
Backup Buddy, a pay plugin works great. Very simple and quick. If you are on the same server but different folder move all the files to the new folder, then go to the old admin and under settings change the site URL. So if you were mysite.com/dev just change that to my site and save. Log out of old, log into new and test. You can then delete the old site with one caveat. Images will still point to the old site. There are free plugins which can clean this up as well. I find Backup Buddy to be worth the expense site it does regular automated backups of my site and can even FTP them or send the backups to DropBox and Amazon S3.
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LikeIt's always a pain transferring a blog to a new server. As you say make backups, then at least you won't lose your site/data.
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LikeLove this article.
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