How to Move WordPress Host

Where to host your Wordpress site – read on to find out more about our experience of working with WPEngine.

We’ve just finished moving a load of WordPress sites to a new host. Before we started we were scared, we had visions of those nightmare house moves where everything is thrown in random boxes and where you always end up leaving something behind! A bit like this:

Migrating your wordpress site
Migrating your WordPress site doesn’t need to look like this

Instead, we managed to get the whole migration looking a bit like this:

Easy Migration
Easy Migration

In fact, it was so easy, it was almost the same as having somebody neatly pack all of your boxes, come and move them and then unpack them in exactly the same place as they were before. Only in a slightly faster, easier-to-use house.

The whole process was way quicker than we thought it was going to be (less than 10 minutes for most of the sites we transferred), we even ended up transferring a few sites that we hadn’t planned to migrate until a later date.

How on earth did we do this? I hear you scream. Well, we’d already kinda selected WP Engine as our preferred host thanks to the wealth of good feedback we’d received from industry contacts as well as online. But their easy migration tool really did seal the deal for us. In essence, the whole process can be distilled into 3 pretty straightforward steps (you can read the gory detail here):

  1. Install the migration plugin on your existing site
  2. Enter the settings given to you by WP Engine into the plugin
  3. Click start

Bob’s your uncle, the whole process is underway.

You’ll then need to change some settings to point your domain e.g. digitalninjas.com at your shiny new WP Engine account – most of the people we work with seem to use GoDaddy or 1and1 – both of these are pretty straightforward (WP Engine have detailed instructions here).

We’ve been really happy with WP Engine since migrating digitalninjas.com and a bunch of other sites to them several months ago. In the rare scenario where we did hit a technical issue, I’ve always found that their support staff fix things pretty quickly. Whereas some hosting company’s support teams kinda assume you’re an infrastructure expert and blind you with technical detail the folk at WP Engine just seem to get the job done and explain what’s happening in plain English.

To get started with migrating your site to a faster host follow these three simple steps:

  1. Create your WPEngine.com account (plans start from $29/month which we think is pretty good value for a nice fast home for your website)
  2. Install their easy migration plugin (instructions here)
  3. Change your Domain DNS settings (instructions here)

Now you can use the time you just saved to move house should you wish.