Hi Gerald,
Basically there are three steps you need to complete to fully migrate your website to a different web server:
Step 1: Copy your files and folders. Simply make a zip file with all the content of your WordPress folder – it’s easier to transfer one big file than thousands of small ones. Move that file to the new server and extract it into the desired folder.
Step 2: Backup your WordPress database. You can use tools like phpMyAdmin in order to make a backup of your WordPress database. If you experience issues with that, contact the support team of your current hosting company – they should provide you with a .sql file. Then, create a new database on the new server, username for it and grant privileges to that username for the newly created database. Finally, import the dump (your .sql) file in it.
Step 3: Reconfigure WordPress. There are two things that you need to reconfigure. The first one is your database configuration. Often database names and users change because your new account has new name, or simply because you’re using a different password. You need to edit the wp-config.php file in the root WordPress folder and make the necessary changes in it – they are pretty straight forward, you need to edit the DB name, username and the password for it:
define('DB_NAME', 'user_wrdp1');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'user_wrdp1');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password');
Finally, if you’re changing the URL of your website, you need to add these lines to the functions.php file of your theme, login to the WordPress admin backend and remove them:
update_option('siteurl','https://www.new-site-address.com');
update_option('home','https://www.new-site-address.com');
That should do the trick ??
