The Simple Process Of Migrating Your Wordpress Installations

I can teach people all day long how to be able to move and migrate their WordPress blogs around to new hosting accounts, domains, and so on, but this is a risky process. One slip, and you can delete important files, change settings within your database, or even worse. This is why I either recommend first and foremost that people who don't have the skill set either invest in software that does the job for you without any technical skill required, or that they learn the basics first. Today, I am going to give you the basics that you need to learn in order to successfully migrate Wordpress blogs to a new host.

Lets start. The first fundamental skill that you will need is the ability to use FTP. This is an essential skill that you will need in order to transfer files to, and download files from a remote server, plus make edits to those files and so on. For all intensive purposes, I recommend a handful of clients such as CuteFTP, Filezilla, and Coda for these purposes. As much as there are many different clients to choose from in this respect, these clients are the ones that I would most recommend for a newbie to anything to do with FTP. They are easy to use, easy to understand, and easy to get a grasp of.



You are also going to need to gain a basic understanding of mySQL databases, how they look, how they function, plus most importantly, how to import and export them. This is an are that requires great care, as databases are the heart and soul of every single Wordpress installation. If you slip up here, it can result in a corrupted database, rendering your blog useless. To access your database so that you can export and import it, I recommend using phpMYadmin to do this, as it is the safest option, and most reliable. You are also going to need to understand the functionality within your hosting account that allows you to create new databases, plus new users.

Last, and certainly not least, some basic understanding of how to modify your WP-Config file is extremely handy. If you are relocating a blog to a new domain, you will need to be able to insert code in your WP-Config file that tells the database that you are moving to a new URL. This is vital.

This all takes a fairly large amount of practice, but like any other skill, the ability to migrate Wordpress blogs can be learned quite easily and fairly rapidly. Take your time learning the process. Test out your newly learned skills on a test domain. Just remember that without practice, it is going to become even harder to get the process right when it comes time to implement this in a real world environment. Just practice, practice, and you will get it right.