Migrate a WordPress site using a Plugin

You may need to migrate your WordPress site at some point due to various reasons; a major being dissatisfied with your current hosting service provider. Anyways manual migration can be difficult at times especially if you are new to this kind of stuffs and not familiar with the technicality, a bunch of things could go wrong and you may loose your old site if you haven’t kept a proper backup.

However in WordPress, for those in need Plugins help indeed. Here also the plugin shows up to help you with the migration. There are a bunch of plugins in the WordPress repository to accomplish the migration for you, among which All-in-One WP Migration and Duplicator are two of the top ranked. These plugins migrate the whole package for you including the themes, plugins and their settings and also provide paid multi-site migration.

We will be using All-in-One WP Migration plugin as an example in this article. So here I will assume that you have already installed the required plugin. Now lets start migrating.

Please follow the following steps:

Exporting from your old site:
1. From the WP Dashboard goto: All-in-One WP Migration -> Export
2. There are couple of optional fields which you need to consider before exporting.
   

   Find and Replace: If you want to replace some string from the database

   Advanced Options: If you want to exclude some items from being migrated

3. Now you just need to click on EXPORT TO – FILE and then a file with .wpress extension will be downloaded in your computer. This file will be required to import on your new site.
   

   There are various other options like Google Drive, DropBox where you can export your site for backup purpose.

That’s all with Export and now we can move on to Import.

Import in your new site, usually a fresh WordPress install is recommended because the import will overwrite all of your existing content.
1. From the WP Dashboard goto: All-in-One WP Migration -> Import
2. Now you can drag and drop the previously downloaded .wpress file or you can click on IMPORT FROM – FILE and browse to the very file.
3. Now the import procedure will begin and the end a notice, directing you to save the permalink settings twice. So, goto the permalink settings and hit the Save Changes button twice.
   

   You will be required to login to save the permalink settings, but remember the username and password that you have to use, will be of your old site.