Joe Leonard

How to migrate a WordPress website to another hosting company

Introduction

This document describes how to migrate an existing WordPress built website to another WordPress hosting company . (Websites built with like ASP.Net, GoDaddy, DreamWeaver, Java, Squarespace, Weebly, or Wix are NOT discussed in this document.)

It presumes the following:

  • Your website was built with the WordPress.org
  • Hosting is on a normal hosting company and NOT on WordPress.com
  • You have access to the normal WordPress dashboard
  • Normal WordPress plugins can be installed
  • It was built with one of the following
    • The Classic WordPress editor
    • Gutenberg editor
    • Beaver Builder
    • DIVI
    • Elementor
    • WP-Bakery
  • The plugin UpdraftPluswill be used to migrate the website.

In this document I refer to your ‘source site’ and your ‘destination site’. The source site is the site you would like to copy / migrate. The destination site is the site you’re migrating to.

Steps

  1. I will backup your website to a staging server. That way you can keep alive your current website until the new website is ready and not lose visitors or SEO.
  2. On the staging server, I will verify that all content is present with no missing images of text.
  3. The layout, colors, fonts, should all be the same.
  4. The domain name needs to next be pointed to the new hosting company.
  5. Then I will log into your new WordPress hosting .
  6. The backup files will be restored to the new WordPress website.
  7. The URL will remain the same if possible.
    1. For example if your old contact page was

https://your-domain-name.com/contact

there is no problem as the new name will remain the same as

https://your-domain-name.com/contact

  1. If however, the old name is something like https://hostingcompany.com/your-domain-name/contact

Or

https://your-domain-name.hostingcompanycom/contact

you will lose SEO ad the URLs are completely different –

unless you maintain the old web page URL and I can use code to redirect anyone who lands on the older URL to a new URL and also notify search engines to index the new URL. Therefore if SEO is important to you, I suggest keeping the old website alive for 2 or 3 months and redirecting search engines and visitors.

  1. In general a basic website with 10 pages and posts and no special code or non-standard plugins or functionality should cost about USD $300. If you have WooCommerce it could cost an estimated $500

Other issues

Some hosting companies encourage users to use proprietary functionality such as:

PLUGINS

Any proprietary plugin will need to be replaced with a standard WordPress plugin. Examples are

  • Appointments
  • Caching
  • Contact forms
  • Imags sliders

Themes

Many hosting companies offer their own themes so using another theme will probably make some changes in the look and feel of your new website.

Fonts, colors

Generally most hosting companies use the same fonts, for example Google fonts, and colors so this should be no problem.

Whay use Elementor

Many website owners choose a WordPress editor for their first website because it was the way websites ere always build years ago. However, WordPress editing is still very hard to use and there is a steep learning curve. There were no drag and drop web builders like Elementor to make things easier.

With the passage of time, many website owners begin to realize that WordPress built website has limitations that affect their website growth. Moreover, it is quite time consuming to learn how to build pages with the WordPress editor. (It’s a little easier now with Gutenberg). Or they had to rely on a web developer for every little change. So they decide that they want to move to something more powerful and flexible.

Also there are hundreds of free and paid Elementor plugins which give you greater functionality.