Thinking of moving your WordPress site from one server to another? Here are detailed instructions on how to do it via FTP. If you follow these instructions to the letter, you will not have any problems with the migration.
First things first, if you don’t have a good quality FTP client, I recommend to download Filezilla. It is open source, free, and the fastest FTP software that I have used to date.
So….You have FTP software and you are ready to go. You first download the entire folder of that the blog is in from your server to your local computer. Once it is downloaded to your local machine, you can either search through each file to find the server path (not recommended because this can literally take hours), or you can download a free application for your computer to do this for you. Simple Search and Replace allows you to choose a folder on your machine and it will search all files for specified text and replace it with whatever text you choose. You will need to search for your old server path and replace with new path. You can get the server paths from your hosting company.
Next, you will need to download your SQL database from phpMyAdmin. My recommendations for this is to login into phpMyAdmin and choose to save as a file. If your hosting company allows you can save as .gz but if not save as .zip instead of .sql. This will allow for a faster download to your computer.
If you don’t have .zip software, you can download 7 zip file manager for free. Again, it is open source and performs very well. I recommend it and use it myself. It allows you to unzip any format and works well.
Once the file is downloaded, unzip it and open it in a php editor. I say this because I use tsWebEditor because it is free and open source.
Once you have the .sql file open, you can select edit->find (or CTRL+F for the keyboard shortcut), and enter in the old server path and the new server path where the blog will be installed. If you are using tsWebEditor, be sure to select from start in the options box and then select replace all. Save this file but keep it open.
Login on your new hosting site and create a new database. Whenever it active, you need to login to the phpMyAdmin for that database and the easiest method to get the new database uploaded is to select SQL from the options and enter the new database in there. If you have a large database (5mb or larger), it is probably easiest to select part of the code from the sql file that you have open in tsWebEditor and use the cut/paste method of getting it into the database. You can import about 1500 lines per cut/paste this way.
Most hosting companies won’t allow a database larger than 1mb to be uploaded and this is why I suggest getting your new database uploaded using this method.
Once you have the entire database uploaded, there is one last file to edit with the details of your new server prior to uploading the folder to your new server. You will need to open wp-config.php in the root folder and edit the details of your database. Most of the time, your database location is localhost, though I know if you are moving to GoDaddy, the database location is actually a separate server from where your site will be uploaded. Be sure that this information is correct!
You are just about ready to upload this folder to the server now. Last thing to do is make sure that there is no .html files anywhere in the root of your folder. Sometimes, your old server will have 500.html, 501.html, etc. in the root of your server and these can actually cause problems with your new server being able to parse php. Simply delete these files. Also, if there is a file named error_log, delete it as well. It will server no purpose on your new server.
Once you have done this, upload the entire folder to your new server. Once you have completed the upload, it is now safe to point your domain to the new host. This typically can take up to 48 hours but is completed within a couple hours most of the time. Once you are on the new server, you are now safe to either delete the files from your old server or cancel the old hosting plan.
If you need help moving your wordpress site from one server to another, I can help you for only $47 and can have it done usually within 24 hours of payment.
Contact me at the paypal address for details or questions.
I’m sure we all know of Googles drive to include website loading speed in the ranking process, so I thought you might find this technique to speed up your site by 3 to 4 times using 2 lines of code useful.
I think it’ll work with any site, but it’s especially useful if you’re using a heavy CMS like WordPress (I think this site is WordPress?).
Simply, if your server has zlib compression enabled you can add 2 lines of code above the document type in the header, and when a visitors browser calls the pages, your server will automatically compress the page and send the compressed file to their browser.
I don’t want to hog the space here, so if you search for it in Google you should find various sites with instructions.
I’ve been testing it with some of my sites (it takes a couple of minutes to add the code), and it does indeed make a huge difference.
I hope you enjoy this