1. Introduction
Welcome to Madrona Hosting. If you’ve just joined and are wanting to migrate your site from another hosting provider our Plesk control panel makes the process super easy.
If you need help just reach out and we can assist as well.
Things you will need:
- A compressed copy of your original WordPress files
- A SQL dump of your original WordPress database.
2. Create the database
First you will need to create an empty database to which you can import your database into from your other hosting site.
Let’s navigate to the database manager and get started.
Select “Databases” from the left side navigation menu.
From there you will select “Add Database” at the top of the page.
Fill out the highlighted fields. Take note of:
- database name
- database user
- database user password
After clicking OK, the system will create a blank database and user that can access it. You’ll notice there are 0 tables and the size is 0 Bytes.
3. Import database
Now that you have an empty database you are ready to import your SQL dump file from your previous hosting provider.
Select “Import Dump” for the database you wish to populate with our data.
Note: if you select the wrong Database you will overwrite it with this data.
Next you will need to select the SQL dump file to import. This can be on your local PC or you can upload it to your site through the Plesk file manager here.
Important note: The SQL file must NOT be compressed, you will need to decompress it first before using it to import.
Simply press OK when you’ve selected the file. After a short period you will receive a success message.
You should now see how many tables and the size of the database.
4. Upload wordpress files
Now that you have successfully imported your database, now you can upload your WordPress files.
To do that we will use the Plesk file manager. Select “Files” from the left side navigation menu, then navigate to the httpdocs folder.
To upload a file click the + symbol or you can simply drag and drop your file to the folder.
You may upload it in compressed form.
Once your file has uploaded you can then decompress it.
It may decompress into a subfolder. You will need to move the files so that index.php, wp-content, wp-includes etc are in the httpdocs folder.
Once decompressed you should now see your wordpress files.
If they are in a subfolder you will need to move the up they are in the httpdocs folder.
5. Updating wordpress config
Now that your files and your database are in place you’ll need to make a few changes to you wp-config.php file so wordpress will know how to connect to the new database. Simply click on the file name for wp-config.php and it will open the code editor.
You will need to update the following parameters in the wp-config.php file. These are the database parameters you saved from earlier in this process.
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘your_databasename’);
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘your_db_username’);
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘your_db_user_password’);
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);
Replace these values with your parameters. Be sure the DB_HOST is set to ‘localhost’
Save your changes by clicking OK.
Then you can go to the wordpress toolkit and verify you site is functioning. If the preview window does not show what you expect or it says you site is broken hit the refresh icon to reload.
6. Next steps
Now that your site is up and functional you will want to do a few extra things.
- Create SSL certificate
- Update your plugins and themes
- Turn on nginx caching
- Setup scheduled backups