Tutorial – How to move WordPress site to a new server or host

I recently switched from one hosting company to Namecheap hosting and I had to transfer my WordPress sites to this new server. I searched a lot for tutorials on transferring wordpress sites and after reading many tutorials I successfully transferred my sites.

In this post I am going to combine all those tutorials and making a single and easy tutorial for you to follow and easily move your WordPress sites to a new host or server. Downloading the WordPress files is not that difficult but moving database to a new server is a little technical.

Step 1: Open FTP program or login to cpanel through web and go to the Public_html directory where your WordPress site is located. You should see your files like this

Step 2: Download all these files to your local computer.

Step 3: Now you need to download the database file too. For that you should go to cpanel homepage and click on the PhpMyAdmin link as shown in the image below

When you click on the link it will take you to a page where you can see all the databases you have on your server. You should select the database from the list which you want to move to the new host.

In my case the database name is wrdp2 but yours could be anything.

Step 4: When you click on the database name you will see these options on the right side of the panel.

Select the “Export” option from the menu.

Step 5: When you hit the Export button it will show you ask you how you want to save the database file. You should select the option “Save As File” and name your database file whatever you like and press the GO button. In my case I am giving the name to my database file as sitereviverdb as shown in the image below. It will download the database with this name which we will be uploading to the new server.

The browser may prompt you if you want to download the database file or not, select YES.

Now you are done with the old hosting company. You have successfully downloaded the wordpress files and also downloaded the database file.

Now you should login to your new hosting account and follow the steps mentioned below.

Step 6: Upload the WordPress files you downloaded from old hosting to the public_html folder or if the wordpress site is on addon domain then upload the files to that folder.

Step 7: Now we need to create a new database which will be used by the site. Go to your cPanel homepage and click on the MySQLDatabases link as shown in the image below.

Create a new database and to keep the things simple and clear name your new database EXACT as you saved the old database file. In my case I saved my database file as sitereviverdb.sql so I am going to create the new database on this new server with the exact name sitereviverdb

Step 8: Create a new MySQL user.

Step 9: Now you need to give access to the user for the database you just created. Give the user FULL access.

Step 10: Go back to the cPanel homepage and go to PhpMyadmin.

When you go there you should now see the database name, which you just created, on the left side of the page. Click on the database name and you should see the option “IMPORT” on the menu on the right side.

Choose the database file you downloaded from old server and click the GO button to upload it to this new server.

Note: You are still not done, you uploaded wordpress files and database but you didn’t make a connection between them. To make the connection between database file and wordpress you should configure the wp.config.php file which you can find in the main folder where you uploaded the wordpress files.

Open that wpconfig.php file and you should see this information. You should enter the database name, database username and database password as I have written in here.

And you are done
Now you can login to your wordpress admin panel with the same username and password you used to login before.

I hope you find the tutorial easy to understand and useful. If you are having any problem please feel free to post your comments/questions and I will try to help you as much as I can.