How To: Move a WordPress Blog to a New Hosting Account

By StrangeWork.com. So you’ve decided to move your WordPress blog to a new hosting account, but need to know the proper steps to accomplish the transfer seamlessly. WordPress does have some tools available to help you move your blog, but I’m going to show you a much simpler approach.

I’ve broken this tutorial down so even a novice user can understand the steps involved.

Export your entire WordPress database using phpMyAdmin.

1. Login to cPanel on your OLD hosting account. Your login credentials should have been supplied to you when you created your hosting account.
2. Click the MySQL Databases icon listed on your cPanel home screen.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on the phpMyAdmin link.
4. Click the Databases link and select your WordPress blog database. The default naming convention is username_wrdp1.
5. Click the Check All link to select all of your WordPress tables.
6. Click the Export link at the top of the page to export your data.
7. Verify that SQL export is selected and click the Go button to export your database into a SQL file.

This will generate a textbox containing all of the SQL code you need to recreate your WordPress database. Copy this code to a textfile on your computer and save it. You will need it later.

Install WordPress on your new hosting account
Next you need to install WordPress on your new hosting account. The easiest way to do this is using Fantastico, which is a typical component of cPanel.

1. Login to cPanel on your NEW hosting account.
2. Click the Fantastico icon listed on your cPanel home screen.
3. Click the WordPress link under Blogs to begin the WordPress installation.
4. Click New Installation and fill out the required installation information.
5. Install WordPress

Import your WordPress data in to your new WordPress installation
Now we need to import the SQL code from earlier into your new WordPress database

1. Login to cPanel on your NEW hosting account. Your login credentials should have been supplied to you when you created your hosting account.
2. Click the MySQL Databases icon listed on your cPanel home screen.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on the phpMyAdmin link.
4. Click the Databases link and select your WordPress blog database. The default naming convention is username_wrdp1.
5. Click the Check All link to select all of your WordPress tables.
6. Select Drop from the With Selected drop down list.
7. Confirm you want to delete the selected tables. These tables are from your new installation of WordPress and contain no data.
8. Click the SQL link at the top of the page
9. Copy and paste the SQL code from earlier in to the SQL textbox and click Go to execute the query.

Your data has now been imported in to your new WordPress database on your new hosting account.

Copy themes and components to your new hosting account
Your database has all of your settings saved and knows what components and themes you have installed. Simply copy the themes and plugins folder (located in wp-content) over to your new hosting account and your all set!