As I recently mentioned, I moved this move across different service providers yesterday. Doing that turned out to be easier than I expected.
I first thought about using the built-in “Export” tool, but it seemed to only cover posts, categories and some other fields, while I wanted to completely migrate the instance, so everything from the DB to plug-ins and themes.
Turns out that I already had a tool that could do that on its own: XCloner. I’ve been using it since I started using WordPress as it’s completely free without a premium option (rare thing in this ecosystem), and just does the job well. I was originally using it to create backups and send them to an archive of mine regularly.
In this case, XCloner has a “Clone site” feature that doesn’t even needs WordPress installed on the other end, as it will transfer everything on its own.
For that, really easy; first provision some domain name for your target host, it’ll ease stuff quite a bit. For instance, I took next.b.j4.lc for this one.
Then, head to the XCloner website, and download their “Restore script for WordPress”. At this point, decompress it and upload the folder to your web hosting space.
Now, head to XCloner and create a local backup of everything. Just for safety, you can disable your plug-ins before doing that backup in case anything breaks during the transfer, so your instance doesn’t becomes instantly broken.
Once your local backup is done, head to the “Clone Site” tab of XCloner and enter the URL of your target, for instance: https://next.b.j4.lc/xcloner-restore/xcloner_restore.php then, when clicking “Check connection”, it will return a success (if not, double check your URL).
In the next step, you will have to choose the backup to send there and validate once again. This might take some time depending on how large your blog is, so be patient.
After this is done, the next section should extract the backup to the remove machine; do not forget to validate the selection in the drop down, otherwise the backup will never decompress and you’ll be left trying to import nothing.
The last step is to import the database. Put your credentials in the fields, and one thing: avoid the domain replacement, just put the target as your current domain to avoid having to change things later on.
Once you hit next on this, it’ll actually start migrating the database to the new host. Once this is done, start moving your DNS records over and head to the file editor of your new host.
There, you will want to go in wp_config.php and validate that the database connection information is correct. Sometimes, it won’t be corrected by XCloner, which is a bit annoying.
Last step, open your site and log into the administration panel, then time to re-enable your plug-ins one by one. If one is returning an error (this was the case of XCloner ironically for me), completely uninstall the add-on and re-install it.
Once this is all done, well, congrats, your blog is now migrated, You can go back to writing!
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