The purpose of this guide is to offer some help for an easy, fast and safe transfer of your WordPress blog(s) to a different server, keeping the same domain(s). I make such transfers pretty often, always hoping that now I found the perfect host…

Make a strong coffee and take your time, having this page open in a tab or even better in a separate window of your browser while you transfer your blog. Even if you spend time on breaks to clear your mind, you won’t need more than three hours for a safe and cautious transfer of a blog.

— Two important notes before anything else

a) If you are going to move more than one blog, start from the blog you care less, so that any mistake you might make will leave you wiser without having even a small or temporary impact to your most important projects.

b) Make sure you have FTP access to your new server. The usual FTP address of your domain points now to your old provider, but the new provider should have given you an alternative way to access your web space using FTP even before you change DNS configuration.

1) Prepare your new home

* Setup your domain in the new provider.

You may need to give temporarily extra permissions and also to enable debugging. If you receive a 500 error when you access your site using a special temporary alias url, most probably you need to make such adjustments. I can’t write more on this, since it depends on the particular hosting package you selected, mainly on server type, if it is a Linux / Apache or Windows / IIS configuration.

* Get a temporary (alias) url that you will use to browse and test your site until you change DNS settings.

__Installing WordPress automatically

Install a clean WordPress copy on the new server.

* In the automatic setup of WordPress you may need to use the WordPress API to generate Authentication and Security keys.

Note that some providers won’t accept the $ symbol in these keys, in which case you need to replace it with a letter or number.

* Sometimes you may need to install WordPress manually…

__Installing WordPress manually

Most providers offer automatic installation of WordPress (fantastico, etc), but a manual installation is easy too.

First create a database and a user (write down the DB name and the DB user name and password, because you will need them again).

Upload and unzip the latest version of WordPress using the File Manager of your provider or an FTP client, then access your blog using its alias address (this usually is in the form of Your-own-domain.Your-hosting-address.com).

Follow the instructions of the WordPress system to create a wp-config file and complete the installation. In this step you need to give the name of the database you created, its user and DB password.

When you create the first administrator of your blog, you may use any username and password, since this will change when you import your database.

— Now that the WordPress core system is installed in the new server, login to your dashboard and delete the default WordPress plugins. There is no point in doing anything else, since any other change will be replaced when you import your database. Now, let’s see how you need to prepare your blog in the old location.

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