Move Wordpress To A New Host

In December I changed web hosts to Fatcow in order to take advantage of unlimited space and bandwidth, which also meant I had to move 3 websites that used Wordpress as its web/blog content management system (including the one you’re looking at right now). To make sure I didn’t make any giant mistakes, I did it one site at a time, starting with the least important/less trafficked one first and finishing with Groundzero. I did make mistakes on the first 2 installations, but the final install was extremely quick, simple and hassle free thanks to the trial and error process I decided to employ.

If you’re changing hosts but not URLs like I did, you could just copy everything from your old host to your new host and chances are you won’t come across any major issues, but I chose a different route that resulted in a new clean installation that runs quite nicely, and didn’t require any major changes or modifications other than changing a couple of paths to make sure some picky plugins functioned correctly.

First thing you’ll want to do is backup your database. Wordpress uses the MySQL relational database management system for storing and retrieving posts, comments, settings, etc. This is not a scary process and can be easily done through phpMyAdmin or with a plugin such as Wordpress Database Backup. But before backing up the database, it would be a good idea to clean and optimize it with WP-DBManager.

Next to back up are your upload, theme (extremely important especially if you’ve made modifications) and plugin directories which are normally located in wp-content, unless you’ve done what I’ve done and changed the location and name of your upload folder (whatever and wherever it was on your old host needs to be in the same place on your new host). You could just use FTP and download the directories, or use a plugin like Wordpress Backup that creates zip files of said folders.

Now on your new server do a new Wordpress installation, just be sure to use the same paths as on your old host to make things easy, or else you’re going to do an extra couple of steps (which aren’t hard). Depending on how you’re doing the fresh install, you can either choose to use your backed up database now when (or if) you are asked to create a new database or use an existing one, or just create a new one and then import your backed up one later through phpMyAdmin.

With Wordpress and the database freshly installed, all you need to do is upload the theme, uploads and plugin folders to wp-content (or wherever you originally placed them on your old server) and you shouldn’t have to do any configuring, because all the settings should already be in the database or plugin folders/files. With everything installed and uploaded, log in to the Wordpress Admin area where a update database message should appear (don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t) and badda bing badda boom, your Wordpress powered website should be up and running.

There are many ways to move a Wordpress blog, but this worked perfectly for me on the third try. As long as its just the host being changed and not the domain, there isn’t much need for changing values in the database, and all plugins should work the same way they did on your old site with minimal (if any) tinkering. Doing a fresh install may be overkill, but that resulted in lesser junk being transffered over from the old server to the new one, so I’m going to stick with that recommendation because it went smoothly.