Migrating a WordPress website is often viewed as a hassle by many. However, if done the right way, a WordPress migration can be a smooth journey.
In this article, we will be taking a look at some of the top WordPress migration plugins. In addition to that, we will also be covering how you can use these WordPress migration plugins to easily and successfully migrate your WP site.
WordPress Migration Plugins — Three Top Choices
Duplicator
As the name suggests, Duplicator can be used to clone or duplicate an existing WordPress website from location A to location B. With over a million active users, Duplicator surely has a big community of loyal users behind it.
Duplicator can be employed for purposes beyond the scope of simple WordPress migration. Essentially, it lets you migrate your WP site from one server to another with zero downtime, or, more commonly, deploy your website from localhost to a live server with ease.
How to MIgrate WordPress Website using Duplicator?
Once you have installed and activated Duplicator WordPress migration plugin, you will notice a new option in your WP admin area for this plugin. Essentially, Duplicator works by means of Packages — you create Packages that are snapshots of your WP website.
To create a new Package, head to Duplicator → Packages menu.
Once you click the Create New button, you can specify your package’s name and storage path. The free version of Duplicator lets you store files on the same server as the website — the paid version has remote storage options such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
Once the Package is generated, you can use it to migrate WordPress website to a new server.
To restore your WordPress website via a Package, you need to upload the storage file and installer.php to an empty directory on the server. Following that, visit the installer.php file in a browser — for instance, mysite.com/installer.php and the Duplicator installer will take things forward from there.
Duplicator is a fairly popular WordPress migration plugin that is well worth the investment if you regularly migrate or clone your website. Using it as a backup solution is probably not the smartest choice though, as its packages cannot be restored using a third-party utility.
All in One WP Migration
All in One WP Migration is another useful and feature-rich WordPress migration plugin. With over 3 million active installations, this particular WP plugin is by far the biggest name when it comes to free WordPress migration plugins.
The biggest reason behind the soaring popularity of All in One WP Migration is that it supports even older versions of PHP, such as 5.2
We at VeeroTech strongly advise you to use the latest version of PHP in order to gain access to the latest features and security updates. That said, sometimes, certain webmasters have to make the difficult decision of using an older PHP version, owing to reasons such as a particular WP plugin not supporting newer PHP versions, and so on. In such cases, All in One WP Migration makes life easier for everyone by offering backwards compatibility for even obsolete PHP versions.
Beyond that, another common aspect that many WordPress migration plugins tend to overlook is the file upload size limit on shared hosting plans. All in One WP Migration is well aware of this problem and offers a genius way to overcome it — this plugin manages file uploads in chunks of 2 MB each, so even if you are on a severely limited shared hosting plan (not that we at VeeroTech got any such “severely limiting” plan), All in One WP Migration can easily be used to migrate your website.
How to Use All in One WP Migration?
After activation, All in One WP Migration works right out of the box. To export your website, you simply need to head to the Export section and then generate a backup therein. The free version lets you download the exported file, whereas the pro version allows you to store the file to a remote server such as Google Drive or Dropbox.
Similarly, to restore a previously exported site, you should head to the Import section, and then import your file therein.
Owing to its ease of use, All in One WP Migration can also be used as a backup plugin for WordPress sites. You can easily export and import websites as per your needs. That said, it does not offer remote storage options in its free plan, so websites with a lot of content might not be the right fit unless you upgrade to the paid plans.
WP Migrate DB
WP Migrate DB is a purely database migration plugin. It is compatible with all data structures and can also be used to migrate custom DB tables, such as those added by security and eCommerce plugins.
With that said, WP Migrate DB can only be used to export and import your WordPress database. Unless you really know what you are doing and you’re an advanced user when it comes to WordPress migration, WP Migrate DB might not suffice for your needs. The pro version does allow you to migrate WP files and other content beyond the database, such as images and posts/pages. The free one, however, is strictly restricted to the database only.
How to Use WP Migrate DB WordPress Migration Plugin?
Once installed and activated, the plugin menu can be found at Tools → Migrate DB.
When exporting your database, you have the option to compress it with GZip compression. In addition to that, you can also replace your current website domain name in the database tables with a new one of your choice — this is helpful perchance you are migrating to an entirely new website on a different domain name.
The biggest downside? You can only export the database. In order to import anything using this plugin, you need to upgrade to the paid version. While it might sound like a deal-breaker, such is the case with the majority of WordPress migration plugins out there. Importing or restoring is often provided in the premium versions only, barring a few exceptions such as Duplicator and All in One WP Migration as mentioned above.
Conclusion
This brings us to the end of this article about WordPress migration plugins. If you are looking for suggestions, the best possible pick, for most users, is All in One WP Migration. It offers a simplified interface and works out of the box for most users.
Duplicator, on the other hand, is another worthy option and is ideal if you often develop your site on localhost and then deploy to a live server.
If your sole preference is to retain copies of your database or you simply wish to migrate your database, WP Migrate DB is a fairly popular and reputed plugin for this job.
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