The thought of moving your WordPress site can be extremely daunting, particularly if the WordPress site is a major source of income for you or your business.
The truth is that if the move is properly planned and managed, there will be very little disruption if any at all. At Clook we’ve completed many thousands of migrations, from one-page blogs to large web stores hosted on several servers.
In this post, we’ll discuss how to move your WordPress site to Clook without disruption.
Warning
If these steps seem to complicated or you simply want someone else to move your WordPress site for you, help is at hand.
We’ll move your WordPress site to us without charge!
Review your current hosting environment
The first thing that you should do when looking to move your WordPress site elsewhere is review and record your current server environment variables.
You should take a note of the PHP version and modules that are in use.
You can do this by simply creating a phpinfo.php file in the root of your web directory with the following contents:
Make a note of who your DNS provider is and reduce the TTL of a records.
Once the migration of data is complete, you need to replace the existing server IP with the new server IP via your DNS management panel. This change can take up to 48 hours to propagate, meaning that some traffic will hit the site on the old server and some traffic will hit the site on the new server which can cause issues.
To get around this issue, we recommend that you reduce the TTL on all A Records to 600 via your DNS provider. This means that it will only take ten minutes for all traffic to be redirected to the site with the new provider. If that’s double dutch, don’t worry, contact your DNS provider and they’ll be able to do this for you
Copy files and database, create a new database at Clook
In order to migrate your website you need to get a copy of your files and database from your current provider and upload them to Clook.
There are various ways you can do this, FTP, cPanel’s File Manager or even via SSH if you have access.
Create a new database using cPanel’s “MySQL Databases” link
Edit your wp-config.php file
Once you’ve uploaded the files and imported your database, you will need to edit your wp-config.php file to reflect the new database connection details.
Put in place the same PHP version
Use MultiPHP Manager in cPanel to ensure that you are using the same PHP version as was in use on your existing provider.
Test the site
Now that you’ve imported the files and database, it’s time to test that everything is working. The best way to do this is by editing your local host file to point the domain to the new IP address.
Switch live traffic
once you’ve confirmed that the website works you can replace all instances of the old IP address with the new one, via your DNS provider.
Summary
If you managed to follow all the steps above, you should now have a fully working site on Clook’s servers.
For those of you that would like a helping hand, we offer a free migration with every new package purchased.
Simply get in touch and we’ll ensure everything goes smoothly.
Did you know…
At Clook, one of our specialisms is providing WordPress hosting which is significantly faster than a standard install. If you’d like to find out more please get in touch with us.
