New hosting service, different directory structure…

I am a retired former corporate contract Novell network administrator and Windows desktop support person who has done a lot of command-line work in the past, and I have just enough skill and experience to edit scripts but not create complex ones. I am the volunteer webmaster for a non-profit foundation in a remote tourist town in central America – Boquete, Panama. I need to migrate our AltoAlCrimen.org to a new iPage hosted AltoalCrimen.info website – which is up and waiting for the migration.

My problem is that iPage doesn’t use the typical directory structure – there is no public_html subdirectory, and their installer places WordPress in the root directory.

The old website, like others I have used, has a public_html subdirectory in the root directory for the website content – and that was where WordPress was installed. I used the WP “Duplicator” plugin to backup the old site and was planning to do the migration based on James Hunt’s excellent YouTube tutorial.

However, with no public_html at new website, I am stymied. I could simply create a public_html subdirectory and migrate my old site to it. Would that work? Is it likely that iPage points to the root for public access content?

I could do a fresh install of WP with the iPage installer, how would I convert it to duplicate my old website content? (Participant’s database, which is a back-end application only – is no problem. I can do a fresh install of the plugin and import the datafile.) It’s the visible public part of the website and the back end behind it that is my concern.