Many of the web hosting companies you had signed up for might have already provided you with a free website transfer for one website. But what if you had more than one wordpress site in your previous hosting provider? Hosting companies will charge you extra for each site transfer that you request them to make. You can save this transfer fee if you know how to make a wordpress transfer, and I'll help you in doing so.

Transferring a wordpress site from one host to another is an easy process when done correctly. So make sure you follow the steps correctly.

Important : Before you start the transfer process be sure to do a complete backup of your website.

1. Transferring WordPress Files

You will need to transfer your WordPress files to your new host using either the FTP Client(I use FileZilla) or the best method is using cPanel of your old host(saves time).I will explain the two methods below,

Transferring WordPress files using FTP Client

• Select all the files within public_html and save then to your computer.

• Now access the server of your new host using FTP Client.Upload all the files you had downloaded to public_html folder of your new host.

Transferring WordPress files using cPanel

• If your new hosting provider does not use CPanel you can transfer using FTP Client.

• If the new host is using CPanel then you will need to access the File Manger from CPanel.

• Select all the files within the public_html and select the Compress option to compress the files(you can use any archive format, I use tar.gz).

• Click on the compressed file and click on Download to download the file.

• Next, access your new host's cPanel -> File Manager.

• Here go inside public_html folder and click Upload option and upload the compressed file you had downloaded.

• Once the upload process is completed select the compressed file and click on extract option.

• You have now successfully transferred WordPress Files to your new host.

2. Transferring WordPress Database

Its not over yet! You will now need to transfer the database of your WordPress site to your new Host from old Host.

• Go to cPanel of you previous host and access the phpMyAdmin.

• In the left hand side you will see the databases of each of you website hosted on the server.

• Select one database. Now you will see all the tables appear on the right hand side. You will also see an option 'Export' on top of it. Click that.

• Now export the database in SQL format.

• Now access the cPanel of your new host. Wait there!!!

• You will need to create a database in you new host first. In cPanel access MySQL Databases and create a new database and user for it. You can give the same database name and user name as you had given in your old host, if not, you will need to do a slight reconfiguration(I'll explain this at the end).

• Once database has been created and the user has been assigned to the database, you can go to phpMyAdmin from cPanel.

• In phpMyAdmin, on the left hand side click on the database. Once clicked, on the right hand side you will see an 'Import' option. Choose the sql file we had exported from previous host and upload it.

• You have now successfully transferred the database to the new host.

• If your old host did not use cPanel, submit a ticket to them asking how to export the database.

Re-configuring WordPress

• This is a small step. You need to go to public_html folder using either the cPanel->File Manager or using a FTP Client.

• Locate a file named wp-config.php. Inside of which you have to locate the following lines,

define('DB_NAME', 'db_name');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'u_name');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password');

Replace db_name with the name of the database you had created in your new host.

Replace u_name with the user name you had associated with the new database.

Replace password with the new password you had created for the user associated with the new database.

Look at that!!! Seems like a huge process, doesn't it? Actually no. Once you transfer one WordPress site you will know that it isn't actually a big process. It seems huge because I had give more explanation on each and every process.

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