Manual WordPress migrations in a nutshell

This guide will walk through manually migrating a WordPress site to Serversaurus cPanel hosting.

To complete the migration you will need the following information:

1. A backup of your WordPress files, ideally the backup will be using .tar.gz compression.
2. An export of your WordPress SQL database.
3. Your Serversaurus cPanel login details (these can be found within the Welcome to Serversaurus Business Hosting email which was emailed during your product order).

1. Login to cPanel and navigate to the MySQL Database Wizard function, follow the prompts to create your database, database user and assign all privileges to the database user. 

Please store the database name, database user and password for later reference.

2. Upload the website and database backup to your hosting server using your preferred SFTP client, uploading the backup to the public_html directory.

3. Open Terminal and SSH to your hosting server (update the following command with your server login details):

ssh username@servername.serversaurus.com.au

4. Change into your public_html directory:

cd public_html

5. Decompress the website file backup using the follow command, remember to update the backup with your file details:

gunzip -c yourbackupname.tar.gz | tar xopf -

6. Move all files from the backup directory to the present working directory. The following command moves all files and directories recursively (including hidden files):

mv yourbackupname/* mv yourbackupname/.* .

7. Edit the wp-config.php file to connect the WordPress application to the MySQL database:

vi wp-config.php

Then find the section titled MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host and add your stored database details into the corresponding fields. For example:

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define( 'DB_NAME', 'database_test' );

/** MySQL database username */
define( 'DB_USER', 'database_test' );

/** MySQL database password */
define( 'DB_PASSWORD', 'Fc*St@lBpPu0V@*R1' );

8. Now upload your database file by logging into MySQL and importing the database (previous uploaded via SFTP). Firstly check your present working directory using:

pwd

Save the output and append your database filename to the end, for example:

/home2/username/public_html/database.sql

To login to MySQL, update the following command with your database username:

mysql -u database_test -p

Enter your database user password when prompted.

Change into the database (update the command with your database name):

use database_test;

Import your database backup (updating the below command with your previous saved path to your SQL file:

source /home2/username/public_html/database.sql;

Once the process is complete, quit out of MySQL:

quit

9. I recommend checking a couple other files which typically have system specific variables, you may not have these in your WordPress instance so just move onto the next step if this one's not applicable.

Use the ls -asl command when in ~public_html and check whether any of the following files are in the public_html directory:

.htaccess
wordfence-waf.php
.user.ini

If any of the files are in the directory listing, use the cat [filename] command to view the file contents, keep an eye out for any references to the previous directory path and update with the new directory path if required.

As with earlier in this guide, use the pwd command to receive your directory location, use the output as a reference to correct the details within the file.

10. Well done! The migration is now complete! If you've not already, you will need to delegate the DNS to the server, this steps varies between providers so feel welcome to get in touch with our Support Team for specific instruction. To check the website before updating your DNS, you can add a host file entry to your computer.