Migrating a website is not easy nowdays. This tutorial will guide you How to migrate a large wordPress site manually. If your website is large then it should be more complicated issue. Usually we change hosting because of slow performance, malware attack, old php, not enough resources. We can migrate a website both automatically and manually also. This tutorial we will guide how can you migrate your website manually without losing a single file or image whether it's large or small.
If your website is large then you can not migrate it automatically using a plugin. Manually migration causes downtime of your website. Downtime will effect your users because they will see server not reachable message. We will do the migration without a single downtime. Let's start the process.
First we will recommend you to add your domain to cloudflare. See how to add a domain in cloudflare. Now you can see the dns tab of your domain in cloudflare. Your domain is pointed to your server IP. Example 176.22.152.89. Please note the ip of new server or hosting.
Then open your web host manager (example: Cpanel, Plesk, Cyberpanel). Locate your website(suppose your site name is mydomain.com) and open the file manager of your website. You have to go your website's directory. In cpanel it's located inside Public_HTML. Now you will see here are some folders like wp-admin, wp-contents and some files also.
Select all here and archive(compress) them. You can use tar.gz archive extension. That will create a new compressed file. Download the archived file. Now go back to webhost manager again. If it's cpanel you will see here is option namely phpmyadmin. In phpmyadmin your database for the website mydomain.com is located. Now open the phpmyadmin. Go to the databases.
You will see the database name related to your website mydomain.com. For example the database name is mydomain_database. Now click on mydomain_database, then scroll down and select check all option. You are going to download that database. Now click on With Selected and choose export option.
Another interface will be opened. Select "Custom - display all possible options". Now scroll down and select the compression type as gzipped. Scroll down and click on go. You databse will be downloaded now.
Now final step, whatever we have downloaded we will upload them to new hosting. So open the new hosting manager. Add your domain on hosting panel. Go to the file manager and locate your domain. Go to your domain directory. You will find here some files from before. You can delete them or keep them. Now upload the first downloaded file tar.gzip. Extact it on same folder. Open the wp-config file after extraction. Note down database name, user name, password.
Go back to webhost manager. Go to databases and create a new database. Use the same name you noted from wp-config file. Create a new user, use the name and password you noted from wp-config file. Connect the database and user. Now import the database you downloaded previously.
Alternative: you can create new database, new user and password. then edit the wp-config file in file manager and replace the old database name, username, password with new one.
You're all done. Again go to your cloudflare. Find your domain and go to dns manager for your domain. Now edit the dns which are pointed to old server ip, replace them with new server ip. Visit your website. You should able to visit your website now and your site is at new hosting. If here is any error you can change it back to old hosting ip again.
If you didn’t use cloudflare just change the dns for your domain to new hosting provider.
