Transfer WordPress sites to new servers fast and safely


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…