In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at using the excellent AIOWP Migration Plugin to answer the question: How to import existing sites from your old hosting to Pressillion’s managed WordPress hosting.
WordPress provides a variety of different plugin tools to help you migrate your sites from one host to another. Often a host, especially shared hosting, won’t provide you with root access to the server where your sites are hosted. In these situations using one of these tools is necessitated.
For this tutorial, we are going to use the All In One WP Migration plugin to migrate a site into a Pressillion server using an AIOWPM backup, please note that the process looks the same no matter where you’re importing the website.
I’ll refer to the site you wish to migrate as the original site and the site or server being migrated into as your destination site.
Backup your Origin site with All In One Migration
The plugin authors, ServMask, have extensive documentation about using this plugin in their Knowledge Base. You may also contact them for free help here.
Install and activate the All in One WP Migration plugin on your original site.
Once activated go to the All In One WP Migration settings Export page. This includes a Database Find and Replace feature, and more Advanced options you can configure.
Click the EXPORT TO menu, and select File from the dropdown menu.
Once the export is complete, you will be presented with a button to download the site backup.
Another modal will appear and ask you to save the file. Notice that the downloaded file has an extension of .wpress, this is the All In One WP Migration format, you must be very careful not to change this file type.
On your destination server, you can now deploy the destination site into which you will migrate the original site, using the correct origin domain name.
Create New Website
On the Pressillion platform, first, select Create > New Site
Then select Add To Existing Server
Then choose the server you want the site to go on from the list of your servers, name the site and click Create Site.
Migrate the Original Site Duplicate into the Destination Site
Here we’re at the final step where we’ll import the All in One Migration Backup into your Destination website.
Install the All in One Migration Backup plugin on your destination site and activate it.
Once activated, go to the All in One WP Migration Import settings page and click the IMPORT FROM menu in the middle of the IMPORT SITE panel.
A dropdown menu will appear, select FILE.
Now select the All In One WP Migration backup .wpress file you saved to your local machine in Step 1, and click Open.
A popup modal will appear displaying the progress of the upload process, this may take some time depending on the size of the origin site being migrated and your internet connection.
Once the upload is complete, the modal will be replaced with a warning notifying you that the existing site, including all files, plugins, themes, and the database will be overwritten by the migration.
Click Proceed.
Once the migration is completed and your data has been imported successfully, the popup modal will notify you of the need to reset your permalinks before your migrated site can be viewed correctly.
Click the Permalinks Settings link.
You will be automatically logged out. This is because your Pressillion destination site Admin User was deleted when the database was overwritten. You will need to log back in using the Admin User from the origin site.
On the Permalinks Settings page, don’t touch any of the settings, but click save twice.
Now you can update your DNS settings.
