Migrating Wordpress Blog Servers
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009I recently decided to get rid of my dedicated server that I have in Germany as I could not really justify the cost or time spend on administration of it, especially with the Euro getting stronger so the costs going up. In the end I opted for some low cost hosting with Hostgator who I’ve had a very positive experience with recently.
With that being the case, I needed to work out how to easily migrate a number of Wordpress blogs across to a new server and thought it was worth sharing the experience here for others in the same situation as I seem to have got it just about right after two or three migrations.
So here is my step by step guide – hope it’s helpful for others in the same situation:
- Get the new version of wordpress setup first – I would suggest using a temporary domain / sub-domain for this (test.domain.com or something like this). If you have Cpanel included in your hosting then Wordpress is a 1 click install which makes life even easier.
- Login to both the new and old wordpress admin sections – check what plugins you have activated and install them onto the new version of wordpress – this step is important as if you’re using Viper Quicktags for YouTube videos and import your posts BEFORE you add the plugins then they won’t work.
- Replicate the settings of your plugins (google analytics, seo for wordpress, etc) and your permalinks.
- Next go to Tools > Export and export all your posts and comments to a file on your old version of wordpress.. if it’s not the latest version it may not be under tools but you should find it easy enough.
- Next go back into the new version of wordpress, select Tools > Import. It’s a fairly simple step by step process and make sure you assign the posts to the correct user account / create one as part of this process if required.
- All your posts and comments should be setup now – the only thing left to sort out should be the theme so let’s do that next. First, you’ll need to FTP into your old host and go to the wp-content > themes folder and download the theme that you have been using to your local drive.
- Next FTP into the new site and put the theme back in the same location on the new server (in the wp-content folder). Go into the new version of the wordpress admin, select Appearance and you should be able to select your theme.
- If you’ve previously setup Widgets for your theme you’ll need to add these all in again – you can go into your old version of Wordpress and make sure you put them all back into the same order again here.
- Now the new version of Wordpress is an exact copy – the only thing left to change is under Settings. As this is on a temporary domain you’ll need to change your Wordpress Address (URL) and Blog Address (URL) to the correct URL’s. You’ll be logged out and send to the old version of your wordpress when you click on the save button.
- Last step – change your DNS settings (you’re host or register will either give you a control panel to do this yourself or do it for you) so that you point your domain to the new server… This typically can take up to 12-24 hours to propagate across the internet but is usually a fair bit faster than that for most DNS servers.
That’s the lot – I’ve managed to get it down to a fine art and can do it in around 10 minutes now without any problems and the main things to look out for are getting the plugins activated at the right step and getting all the settings and widgets included… Using this method is a hell of a lot easier than exporting tables from an SQL database as others have suggested in the past!