Part 1: WordPress Migration and Its Pain Points

One of the biggest pain-points for WordPress site owners is migrating a website from one host to another. It’s a daunting task that would usually require the expertise of a developer. The entire process is complex, annoying, and demands your time and constant monitoring.

Furthermore, migration involves a prerequisite of know-how–one can make mistakes through the process that would lead to the risk of losing precious data.

Website owners have two choices: either avoid the stress by hiring a developer to do the job, (this becomes an expensive affair)… OR to use a WordPress migration plugin if they have the technical knowledge to do so… but that also requires a lot of manual effort.

The good news is there is now, a simple solution that takes care of these headaches on your behalf and makes the transfer of your website a breeze.  Introducing Migrate Guru—a free, fully automated WordPress migration plugin that is an easy, fast and reliable way to move any WordPress site from any host to any other host in the world.

Part 2: What is Migrate Guru?

Simply put, Migrate Guru allows you to move any WordPress site, or multisite network, to a new host without the headache.

Migrate Guru copies the site in question on to our external servers, and utilizes these servers’ resources to move the site. As a result, it bypasses the usual errors faced while using other migration methods. It allows you to easily move sites as large as 200 GB in size.

With Migrate Guru, you can move your site from any web host in the world to only Bluehost. Migrate Guru is powered by the creators of BlogVault,one of the top WordPress backup plugins.

Migrate Guru simplifies website migration by performing the task with minimal technical knowledge. It also transfers WordPress sites without any manual work, add-ons, or additional tools. It automatically rewrites URLs, bypasses import-export scripts, and handles serialised data.

Migrate Guru is different from other WordPress migration plugins because it uses a simple 1-step process that runs on BlogVault servers. This way, it doesn’t overload the live (source) website, and ensures that websites as large as 200 GB can be moved without any issues.

Prerequisites

There are a few things you need for Migrate Guru to do its job:

1. A domain with Bluehost, with WordPress installed on it.
2. The Migrate Guru WordPress plugin installed on the website to be migrated (i.e. the site to be moved to Bluehost)

3. Your destination server’s IP address (which can be found in your Bluehost cPanel)
4. cPanel details from your Bluehost account

Part 3: WordPress Website Migration to BlueHost Using Migrate Guru

In this do-it-yourself guide, we’ll show you exactly how to move your website to Bluehost using Migrate Guru.

You can also watch this video for a step-by-step walk through.

Step 1: Creating a domain on Bluehost and installing WordPress

Creating a domain

First, create the domain you want to migrate to on Bluehost. You can do this via Add-on Domains in the Domains section of your Bluehost cPanel.

The Domains section will allow you to create a domain or subdomain.

You will need to enter the following fields while creating the domain:

• Domain Name – The name of the new domain you’re creating
• Document Root – The main folder from which your site will be served (i.e. where WordPress will be installed.)
• FTP Credentials –You create a new domain. The new host’s cPanel will also create a FTP user.This user will have a specific username and password. The form you fill up for domain-creation usually has these details. You will need these details later for migration, so make sure you write them down.
• Check the ‘FTP Accounts’ section to verify that a FTP user was created. On completing this step, the domain is created and ready for use.

Note: Sometimes your new host may provide a temporary URL (such as http://1.2.3.4/~mysite). However, if you choose to use it, all internal links will be changed to this temporary URL, which could cause problems with your Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

Installing WordPress

(If your destination domain already has WordPress installed, skip to Step 2)

Option 1: One-click WordPress installation when You Create a Domain

Bluehost has a one-click WordPress installation process, which should start as soon as you select the domain to install WordPress on.

During this installation process, make sure that the option ‘Automatically create new database’ is checked.

Option 2: One-click Install for Previously Created Domains

If you’ve already set up a domain on Bluehost, follow these steps to install WordPress:

1. Find the Website section under ‘Hosting’ of your Bluehost account and select ‘ Install WordPress’ as shown in the image below:

2. Click the Install button.

3. Choose the domain name to install it to. In the field next to the domain, you can enter a subfolder such as ‘blog’ or leave it blank if you want the site’s main page to be the blog.

4. If required, you can edit the admin email address, username, and password for the new WordPress installation.

5. Read through the license and service agreements and check the boxes.

6. Select the Next button to install WordPress.

Step 2: Install and activate the Migrate Guru plugin on the site you’re moving to Bluehost

Next, you need to install and activate the Migrate Guru plugin on the site you’re migrating. For that, you need to open the ‘Plugin’ section which appears on the left-hand-side of your WordPress admin dashboard.

Click on ‘Add New’ and search for ‘Migrate Guru’ in the keyword search bar as shown in the image below.

Make sure you have a domain to migrate your site to on Bluehost, and that you have WordPress installed on this domain.

Step 3: Migrating to Bluehost with Migrate Guru

1. Click on ‘Migrate Guru’ from either the list of plugins on your site, or from the side menu.
2. On the Migrate Guru plugin page, you will be able to see the names of all web hosts. Select
‘Bluehost’ from the list of hosts available as shown in the image below.

Step 4: Filling out the Migrate Guru migration form

The Migrate Guru plugin will give you a form to fill out. The fields on this form include:

• Email: Migrate Guru will send you updates at different stages of the migration. You will need to enter the email to which these notifications will be sent to.
• Destination Site URL: This is the URL of the site (domain) you’ve set up on Bluehost.
• Destination Server IP address: This is the server IP address of the site configured on your Bluehost account.

To find these details, follow the steps below:

1. Log in to your Bluehost account and head over to the menu bar displayed at the top of the
Page.

2. Click on ‘Hosting’ and choose ‘cPanel’ as shown in the image below:

3. After you are done with this, you will find the destination server IP address in the left-hand bar of the cPanel page.

4. cPanel Username and password: Your cPanel details are the details you use to log into your
Bluehost account. For the cPanel username, access the mail Bluehost sent you when you first signed up for an account– this email will contain your cPanel username. (The subject of the email would be ‘Welcome to Bluehost’).

The cPanel password is usually set when signing up for Bluehost service. It is the same password you use to login to your Bluehost account.

Note: If you’ve forgotten your password, click on the ‘forgot password’ link from the login page.

Bluehost will then mail you a password reset link, which you can use to set a new password.

5. Advanced Options: Click on this button ONLY if either the site being moved or the destination
site are ‘https://’ instead of ‘http://’.

Note: If the URLs of either one begin with ‘https://’, they are HTTP authenticated. If your Bluehost domain’s URL is protected with HTTP authentication, you would have received an email with the validation credentials. These credentials can also be retrieved from the site’s server logs.

Once you have all the required details, enter them in the Migrate Guru form.

Step 5: Click on Migrate.

After you click Migrate, Migrate Guru will send you an email notification confirming that the process of migration has begun.

Meanwhile, you will also be taken to a screen that portrays the real-time process of your website
migration. A link to this page can also be found in the email notification.

Once the migration process is completed, you’ll receive another email from Migrate Guru notifying you about the successful migration.

You can view your new site by clicking on the ‘Migrated Site’ button, which you’ll also receive a link to in your email alert.

With this simple process, moving or transferring sites as large as 200 GB is a breeze.

Simply enter your hosting details & click ‘Migrate’. That’s it!

Part 4: Use-case Scenarios and Limitations

Use-cases

Migrate Guru can handle many difficult migration scenarios based on the expertise it has garnered in the last 5 years, by processing over 5,00,00+ migrations.

It is especially efficient at moving:

1. Entire WordPress multisite networks

In order to move an entire WordPress multisite network, simply install the Migrate Guru plugin on the main site. The plugin will automatically detect the nature of the site, and become ‘network
activated’. You can then proceed to move the entire network as if it were a single site.

2. Large WordPress sites

Where other migration methods employ the server resources of the site being moved;

Limitations

Migrate Guru covers most WordPress migration scenarios, but the following scenarios are currently not supported by Migrate Guru:

1. Local site migrations

Migrate Guru only works with publicly available WordPress sites. As a result, it can not be used to move a locally-hosted site (i.e. a site that is hosted on a client’s computer, and not on a hosting server) to any other domain.

2. Migration of a subdomain of a multisite independently to a main domain OR migration of a
multisite to a sub-domain.

Currently Migrate Guru can only move entire WordPress multisite networks, since these scenarios present complexities that must be handled with extra caution.

Part 5: FAQs and Resources

If you (or your client) have any questions related to Migrate Guru, these links should help you:

• General FAQs (these help with the basics of Migrate Guru).
• Technical FAQs (this section answers questions about how to use Migrate Guru).
• Security FAQs (to help with any questions you might have related to Migrate Guru’s security).
• FAQs about Migrate Guru’s limitations.

What to do in case of an error:

While Migrate Guru doesn’t usually time out during migration, you might run into errors (e.g. if the FTP or HTTP credentials are entered incorrectly, or if the client’s account doesn’t have FTP-write access, etc.)

If you do run into errors while using Migrate Guru, we request that you email us at
support@migrateguru.com so we can identify the issue for you and help you fix it.