How to Migrate Your WordPress Site

Migrating WordPress remains one of the more frustrating and difficult tasks of a publisher. There are a number of ways to accomplish site migration, but I’ll describe a few here. Also, the more content and media you have on your site, the longer the process will likely take.

We now have a simple guide to moving your wordpress site.

When you move a WordPress site, you need to be concerned about several things: 1) the WordPress database, 2) WordPress themes, plugins, media and image files and 3) possible changes to the site URL address. The process is described in detail in the WordPress codex. Here’s a very good tutorial of the process that you need to undertake to move your site.

WordPress has a built in Export tool and there is also an Import plugin. This can be helpful for migrating content but doesn’t address full site moves, migrating media files, et al.

The VaultPress service can be used to take a backup of your site on one server and fully restore (move) the site to a new server. I had an extremely large client site that this did not work well for – but for average-sized sites, this may be the easiest approach. BackupBuddy offers a similar capability.

Duplicator and the All in One WordPress Migration plugin are other solutions.