In this video, I demonstrate how to use BackupBuddy to move your WordPress site to a new domain. These instructions will be the same if you are changing hosts or using the same host. Before starting this demo you will need to do these four things:
1) Install BackupBuddy plugin on your existing site.
2) Setup hosting for your new domain and get your FTP username and password. Many hosting accounts allow multiple sites under one account, so might be able to use your existing hosting account. Or you can choose to move hosts. I like Siteground, WPEngine and LiquidWeb.
3) Point your new domain to it’s new home, via your domain registrar.
4) Create an empty MySQL database for the new domain. Get the database name, database username, and password.
AFTER your move, you will want to 301 redirect your old domain to your new one. Here’s how.
Hi. Barbara Feldman of WordHer.com, and today I’m gonna demonstrate how to use BackupBuddy to move your site to a new domain name.
So, in this case, I’m actually moving it to a different hosting account. But you can use this same procedure to install a new WordPress with your new domain as a subset of your existing hosting account.
As I said, we’re gonna be using the BackupBuddy plugin. First I’m gonna make a complete backup and then I’m gonna use Restore Migrate to move the site.
This is the domain I’m gonna move it to. Test.LightAFire.com.
Before I make the backup that I’m going to use to move the site, I’m gonna deactivate a couple of plugins that I do not want activated right away on my new site.
And this is just because over the months and the years I have found that these can cause problems. In my particular case, they are the security plugin, iThemes Security, and my caching plugin, W3 Total Cache, which uses a CDN, and I do not want to use the same CDN with the old site and the new site.
So, that’s it. And we are ready to start with our backup. And so we start in BackupBuddy by making a complete backup.
So, this is gonna get both my database and all my files, and this is going to create a zip file that we’re going to move from the old domain to the new domain. But we’re not doing this manually. We’re gonna let BackupBuddy do the work.
OK? Our backup is complete, and now we’re going to use the Restore Migrate function. And here is the backup that we made one minute ago. We want to verify that it is a complete backup; what Backup Buddy calls a full backup.
And we are going to use the Migrate function.
I am going to send files via ftp, and so I need to input a few details such as username, password, and server address.
And we’ve input the name of our server where we’re moving our files to, username password, what our remote path will be, and the migration URLs.
So, you’ll note in this case that the new URL is different from the old URL, whereas before, our existing site is on www.LightAFire.com, our new site is gonna be at Test.LightAFire.com.
Now, we test those settings to make sure they work. Our test is successful, so we can add that destination, and now we can choose that destination.
Now, one more time, we want to verify that our destination URL is here. We’re gonna begin the migration. It has its first success and now it’s asking us what we want to restore, and we are going to; we don’t need the advanced options. We just need to restore both the files and the database.
And it’s now telling us that our files have moved and it’s waiting for us for information about our database.
If we look using an ftp program, we can see before where there were no files, we now see our files. So we know that our files have moved successfully.
Now I’m just gonna fill in this information here. Now I’ve filled in information about our new database. I’ve given it a new database prefix. And next step: Now it’s restoring our database.
We can see how we’re going with that; the progress bar is moving rather quickly. We have a success message. One more time it’s asking us what our WordPress address is going to be.
And it’s already figured this out.
Now it’s migrating the database, meaning that it is doing a search and replace of www.LightAFire.com with our new URL, Test.LightAFire.com.
And now it’s asking us to take a look at the new site. And everything looks good at our new URL. So, we can go ahead and finish the cleanup, which is gonna delete a few of the BackupBuddy files that were used.
And we are all set.
A few more things we want to do that involve logging in to our brand-new website. OK, now we’re gonna log into our WordPress control panel at our new site. And we are going to do one more thing.
I have noticed that the search and replace of the old domain name with the new domain name works a hundred percent, except for in the widgets. So, I am now just going to do a quick browse of all my widgets to see if I can find any of the old domain name in there.
And in this case, I’m in luck. They are not there. If I want to, at this point, if I need to reinstate the plugins, I can do that here. And if I need to keep this site out of the search engines, because I am going to use it for a staging server and I do not want the search engines to know about it, I need to make sure that I check search engine visibility to discourage search engines from indexing the site.
And that’s it. And that’s the end of our video. I hope you found it helpful and you’ll check more tips of ours over at WordHer.com. Goodbye now!
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