How to Migrate WordPress to a Fast SSD VPS

If you are serious about your blog or webste I would recommend an SSD hosting provider like Cloudways. Shared hosting service providers generaly are hosting on old mechanical hard drives causing a decrease performance when accessing your website.

If you are you running a business it is very important to make sure it’s working with the best and highest performance so that your viewers will experience the best.

In this article, I will explain how you can migrate your WordPress website to an SSD VPS hosting so that it works with highest performance.

The reason I use cloudways is because of their pricing compared to other VPS hosting companies. If you want to compare pricing click on each individual link to find out for yourself.

Compare price: Cloudways   Godaddy   Hostgator

For this tutorial, I am going to use Cloudways. It’s a managed hosting service provider with infrastructure running on the latest technology in cloud SSD hosting.

Migrate WordPress

Visit cloudways.com and click on the START  FREE button on the top right corner.

It will show you the signup form, you can use your LinkedIn, GitHub or Google account to sign up. Fill in the necessary information and click start free.

Now it will ask you to verify your mobile number enter your mobile number and click on send the verification code.

Once verified you will be logged in to Cloudways dashboard.

Now under application and server details. Select WordPress version and then name you are managed app, name your managed server and your project name.

Then select with which company you want to host your website, then select the server size and location where you want to deploy the website as per your requirements. It will show you the estimated cost. Now click on Launch Now.

It will start the server creation process and your server will be ready in a few mins.

Once your server is created you can see the status of the server and other details like public IP address etc.

Now click on www and select the application you have just created, in this case, AvoidErrors.

This will open settings related to the WordPress application that you have deployed. Like your public URL, admin panel details and public IP address.

On the left hand side, click on Migration Tools and download the WordPress migration plugin to start the migration process.

Once downloaded, go to your old wordpress site which you want to migrate. Login to WordPress admin panel and then click on Plugins and then click on Add New and then click on Upload Plugin that you have downloaded and then click Install.

Once installed, click on Activate the Plugin button.

As soon as the plugin gets activated, you will see Cloudways migation configurtaion window. Fill in the necessary information as under.

  • Your email address.
  • Destination URL will be your application URL.
  • Database Name will be under MYSQL ACCESS, click to copy that.
  • Public IP address is listed on Dashboard.

To get the FTP user name and password, click on the servers at the right corner of your Cloudways dashboard.

Then copy your Master Credentials and enter in your wordpress plugin.

This will start the migration process.

Once migrated, you will have a fully functional website with cloudways.

Update DNS

Now login to you domain registrar like GoDaddy or HostGator website and modify the domain DNS settings to point to new URL.

Modify @ Record it to public IP address assigned by cloudways. Then update www record and point it to your application URL. You can get application URL by clicking on Domain Management in left side menu. And then enter your primary domain.

Cloudways offer you to clone your server, so that it will have the exact copy of the server and the website you have installed on it and perform testing before applying the changes to the primary domain.

You can also restore your website in case something goes wrong. The best part is cloudways created an exact copy of your website to ensure a smooth restoration process.

To restore your website, click on Restore option on the left side menu and select from the available backup. Once done, click on Restore Application Now.

Following these steps, you can copy your entire WordPress website from your shared hosting to Cloudways without any hassle.

Muhammad Imran Habib

Imran is a technology evangelist with 8 years of experience working with some of the Industry leading companies. Imran's expertise includes On-Prem/Virtual Infrastructure deployments, IT Solutions for SMEs, End User Computing Support.

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