How to Migrate Your WordPress Site Using Duplicator Plugin (No Downtime)
Tutorial Hosting
Hey everyone this is tony teaches tech i’m tony and in this video i’m going to show you how to migrate your wordpress website from one host to another host and the way we’re going to do this is with a wordpress plugin a free wordpress plugin called duplicator and the duplicator plugin essentially
Creates an archive of your wordpress website as it exists right now on your current hosting provider including all the files and the databases we’re going to download that archive file and basically upload it to the new hosting provider and install an exact copy of wordpress that way so
This there’s a part of this tutorial that might look different for you depending on what your destination hosting provider is whether you’re going to access it through ftp or you know how you’re basically going to upload those files but if you understand the general concepts in this
Video you can pretty much follow along step by step throughout the tutorial start to finish regardless of what your hosting provider is going to be so if that’s something i want to learn how to do let’s go ahead and get on into the tutorial here um this will i actually one other thing
I want to say is this is going to have no downtime on your website whatsoever this is going to have zero impact on your from the perspective of your users on your website so it’ll be seamless from that perspective okay let’s go ahead and get on into the tutorial
The website that we’re going to be moving is swampview.com so what we’re going to do is first start by going into the wordpress admin dashboard and installing the duplicator plugin so let’s go to the plugins add new and we will search for duplicator hit enter and that’s one of the first
Results this one by snap creek let’s install that and after that’s done installing as always we will activate the plugin now before we create the archive of our website it’s going to basically take a snapshot shot of it is at this point i i’ve been through this before i highly
Recommend that you deactivate all of your other plugins just so that there’s no issue on the new uh hosting provider because i’ve i’ve run into that before where you know you create the archive you upload it and then the website just doesn’t work for because one of the plugins is incompatible so
What i recommend you do is temporarily deactivate i realize this could impact your your users but will be as quick as possible 30 seconds to a minute max and then we’ll go into the duplicator plugin we’ll create a new archive that’s fine for the naming convention click next
It’s scanning our site it’s checking everything out we get all good passes here so we can build the archive this part takes you know 15 20 seconds so we’ll just fast forward through this okay and now that that’s done we have two files that we have to download one
Is this installer file and one is the actual archive file so while that’s downloading let’s go back to the plugins section and reactivate all of our plugins just so that the users coming to your website don’t experience anything weird happening on your website okay so we’ll
Uh we’ll just get rid of these messages that pop up and we should be good to go so let’s take this archive file in this installer file and upload it to our new hosting provider because as i said these are basically snapshots of your wordpress website as it exists so let’s go back
To uh well not back to let’s go to our new hosting provider for the first time i’m using namecheap and they use cpanel for their hosting control panel and this is the part of the tutorial where it might be slightly different for you basically what you want to look for in
Your new hosting provider is a way to upload a file to your new website just to the public root directory of your new website you can do that with ftp ssh any number of different ways whether that’s through a web browser or not i do have some videos on how to do that
Which i’ll link in this video as well but what i’m going to do in cpanel is go to the file manager and i do already have the the basic infrastructure set up for swampview.com so i’m going to open up that folder and when the site is live this is what will
Hold this will serve the files out of this website to swampview.com so i’m going to upload the installer in the zip file here so let’s click on upload and then we’ll drag the installer here and we will drag the zip file here this probably take about a minute to upload
So we’ll also fast forward through this okay guys those files have been uploaded to our new website host and what we’re gonna do now this is a little bit confusing to explain but basically when we go to swamp swampview.com right now this is being served from our old website host
We can basically trick our computer to thinking that when you type in swampview.com to the web browser it’s going to go to the new website host and the way we can do this is by editing our hosts file and telling our host file instead of going here
We want you to go to this ip address where our new website is going to live so i have specific instructions for this on windows but what i’m going to do here on screen today it’s going to be for mac so there’s there’s subtle differences but the concepts are the same so
What i’m going to do is open up a terminal window here you can also use the finder file explorer to navigate to this file i’m going to do is type in sudo vim vim is a text editor etc hosts so this is our host file we’re basically just editing this host file on
Our computer and type in the password for your user account and down here at the bottom of this file it’s going to look different for you but basically you want to take this ip address and associate it with our domain name so let’s type that in 198.54.120.215.
And that is going to be associated with swamp view.com so like i said anytime we go to swampview.com we’re going to go to this ip address instead of the publicly available old hosting provider’s ip address okay so we’ll save that and to demonstrate that that is actually working
I think the best way to do this is to open up a guest window or some type of incognito window just so we avoid any caching issues and if we go to swampview.com now we see that this is our installer file that we uploaded in our zip file that we
Uploaded so this is just showing a directory index of the those files and you know you can either click on installer.php or you can go slash installer dot php because that file exists at that location hit enter and we will continue the process of installing wordpress on our new hosting provider
So let’s go through this four-step process we have a write-in accept to the terms and notices okay click next and it’s going to extract all the archive files uh into this directory we can see that happening in real time if you go back to our file manager and refresh this
You’ll see that the the basic wordpress infrastructure well not this this is this is the copy of your wordpress website uh with the basic wordpress infrastructure here as far as like your index file and what actually while we’re in here um you don’t want to end up in a situation like this where
You have two index files i know from experience that index.php is wordpress’s index file but we don’t this one is probably just like a landing page from the old hosting provider that they had like a default landing page so i’m just going to delete that because we’re definitely not going to use that
But everything else in here looks good so let’s pull that window back up the extraction of the archive has finished step two is to connect to a database so in order to well if you in case you’re not familiar wordpress uses a database to store
All of the blog posts and all the pages and all the comments and all that stuff so what we’re gonna have to do on the the destination hosting provider is set up that database so we need a database name a database user and a database password
And we can do that within cpanel so and again this might be slightly different for you if you’re not using cpanel but at your new website hosting provider you want to set up a database okay that’s basically the the gist of what we’re doing here so let’s go to the database section here
And go to mysql databases and i’m going to make a new database called swamp i’m just going to call it swamp and then that database has been created and then we’re going to create a user let’s call the user swamp user we’ll give the user a password
I’m going to have a password over here that i’m going to use so paste that in there we go let’s create that user and then the last step here is to associate that user with the database so if you go down a little bit further add
User to database we want to add the swamp user to the swamp database okay oh and then last step here is to grant privileges to that user i’m going to give them all privileges for the sake of this demonstration i’m not recommending you do that for your website
Okay so that’s good we have our database let’s connect the installer to that database so if we come back here i’m going to paste the password because i already have that on the clipboard here the database user is let’s find them here this right here so we’ll copy and paste the database user
Oops yeah that will copy the database name and then we’ll get the database user which is a swamp user with the prefix okay let’s test that connection everything looks good we got a pass in a good so let’s click on next uh everything looks okay so click on ok
It’s installing the database and what it’s doing is basically taking a copy of your old wordpress website’s database and applying it to this new wordpress website’s database okay so we’re going to end up with the same thing um title url path that looks good if you’re
Probably not going to want to make any changes here so click on next and it is finalizing the install we’re good we’re on step four of four now we can log into the admin dashboard for wordpress i’m gonna type in my credentials here okay and then we’ll log
In and the installer as you can see here cleans up after uh itself so we’ll close that um since we’re on a new hosting provider at this point um let’s in let’s reactivate those plugins so let’s click up here select all plugins and activate them and
I know this seems like for some people like a lot of hand waving and and trickery and stuff but um let me just prove to you what what we’re working with here okay so the way i’m going to do that is i’m going to create a
A new page here it’s just going to be a draft page and say like this this is the new website host okay we’ll just save that as a draft so when we go into our make sure we save it save it as a draft uh when we go to our pages we’ll see
That we have this draft page this is the new website host okay so at this point we know we’re on the new website hosting provider now the only reason we’re seeing that is because we edited that etc hosts file so if we undo that so let’s undo that
Save um we will go back to seeing the old website hosting provider and and let me completely get out of here uh so just so again with the caching issues let’s go to a new guest window and go to swampview.com that’s going to load swamp view so let’s log into this
WordPress admin okay and now because we undid our etc host file we should not see that draft post because this is an entirely different copy of the wordpress website the original copy on the old hosting provider so that’s why we don’t see that now we have a working copy that’s publicly
Accessible on our old hosting provider and we have a working copy of our website that is not public publicly accessible on our new hosting provider the last step that we want to do is basically switch over our dns records from pointing from the old hosting provider to the new hosting provider so
Instead of pointing to the ip address of the old host we point to the ip address of the new host and we kind of did that on a local basis in our etc host file but now we want to do this for everybody so what we want to do is get that ip
Address again from our cpanel or your new hosting provider if that’s different than cpanel so it’s this ip address ending in two one five and where i bought my domain name is google domains so i’m gonna go find that domain name in my list of domains here
In google domains and again if you bought your domain name from somewhere else same concept applies you just have to find your domain name which is right here and then go to the dns settings for that domain name and instead of pointing to the old ip address
Let’s point it to the new ip address and just to be crystal clear about this let’s in this guest window let’s verify that we’re looking at the the correct website so the old website so let’s refresh this page and you’ll see all those references to the the old hosting provider 34 71
83 277 right the ip ending in 277 that is what the current the the old dns records pointed at so we want to update those from the old ip address to the new ip address save that and then there’s also one for www.swampview.com so we’ll edit that one as well
Save that and now as those dns records are updated and let me show you what i mean by that in case you’re not familiar if you go to dnschecker.com and go to swampview.com to look up the a records you’ll see that most of them are pointing to the ip address ending in 277
Now over the next few minutes to an hour these dns records will slowly be updated to the new ip address so that’s it just depends like there we go we got three of them now pointing to the new ip address so as time goes on more and more will
Resolve to the the new ip address and that’s what i mean when i said there’s going to be no down time there’s going to be basically depending on where you’re at in the world a slow trickle of your users from looking at your old website to your new website the old
Hosting provider to the new hosting provider um and yeah that that’s that if if we sit here long enough we can and if we refresh the page long enough while disabling cache we might see this switch over to the new ip address and i think just for the sake of this
Tutorial i’ll i’ll pause here and i’ll resume the video when everything has been updated to the new ip address and then we should be able to see that that page that that draft page uh that we made um in our wordpress admin dashboard so let’s go ahead and do that okay guys i’m
Back and i’m happy to report that when we look at the source of these resources they are coming from the new ip address ending in two one five and uh just as one last confirmation let’s go to the wordpress admin dashboard we will log in here with our username and password
And this time if we look at the pages section we should see that we do have the the the draft that we created when we were on the new website host so now we are confident that our website is being served up to its users our users our visitors from the
New website host and the wordpress migration has been completed so um i know there’s a lot of steps involved in this but if you got any value out of it please give it a thumbs up if you have any questions let me know in the comments below i’ll do my best to help
You out i want to thank you guys for watching please subscribe for more videos like this from me in the future and if you do i’ll see you in the next One You
Learn how to migrate a WordPress website to a new host using a free plugin called Duplicator. This method ensures that your website has no downtime for your visitors. For more information, visit https://tonyteaches.tech. Check out my vlog channel @TonyFlorida #wordpress #duplicator #migration
#Migrate #WordPress #Site #Duplicator #Plugin #Downtime
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