Migrate my WordPress site manually
Manually moving a WordPress site into your Managed WordPress account is complex and can be confusing if you don't know your way around a couple of pieces of software generally used by IT people - specifically, an FTP client like FileZilla, an SSH client like Terminal, the old-school command line interface, and phpMyAdmin, a database management app.
- A Managed WordPress or Pro Managed WordPress account that is set up and working to move your site to. The contents of the WordPress account you're moving to will be overwritten.
- An FTP client to move your site files. There are many third-party FTP clients available, we recommend the FileZilla FTP client.
- A text editor to make the necessary changes in a SQL file. There are many third-party text editors available, we recommend Notepad++. Do not edit files in this series with a word processing application like Microsoft Word.
- Give yourself 30-60 minutes to complete all six steps.
This procedure will walk you through manually moving a WordPress site into your GoDaddy Managed WordPress account. This procedure may not work for moving a WordPress site into a different hosting environment. Try this procedure only if the auto-migration tool wasn't able to move your WordPress site on its own.
Manually moving a WordPress site into your Managed WordPress account has these six parts:
- Part 1: Copy the wp-content folder for the WordPress site you want to move.
- Part 2: Make an SQL dump file of the database for the WordPress site you want to move.
- Part 3: Upload the site content to a Managed WordPress site in your account.
- Part 4: Update the site database in your Managed WordPress account.
- Part 5: Change the table prefixes throughout the database (if necessary).
- Part 6: Make final edits to the Managed WordPress site files.
