Before you start down the manual road of how to move a website to a new host, we’d encourage you to check whether your new host offers a free migration service (or an affordable paid service).
Many hosts will migrate at least one website for free when you sign up. If you’re moving from one cPanel host to another cPanel host, it’s also usually pretty easy for your host’s support staff to migrate your entire cPanel account, which means you’ll be able to bring everything over in one step.
How to move a website to a new host – step-by-step
If you’re set on manually migrating your site to a new host, here’s a bird’s eye view of the steps that you’ll take in this tutorial:
- Add your domain name to your new host
- Move your site’s files using FTP
- Export your site’s database from your old host
- Create a new database and import it to your new host
- Update configuration details if needed
- Test your site
- Move custom email addresses
- Update your domain’s nameservers
- Test everything again
Before getting started, we recommend taking a full backup of your site using whichever method is available. While this process shouldn’t break anything, it’s always good to have a recent backup in hand when making any major changes to your site.
