Migrating Site to GoDaddy Basic Managed WordPress

, , , , , , ,

Recently was not able to convince a client of the benefits of having me professionally manage, host and maintain their website for them. They wanted to save money and use GoDaddy’s Basic Managed WordPress service. So I had to migrate their completed demo over to it but ran into countless errors with GoDaddy’s hosting platform.

The GoDaddy migration tool was useless as was GoDaddy support. GoDaddy support insisted that I upgrade the server in order to complete the migration. But I only had delegated access to the clients account with no ability to purchase said upgrade because the client did not grant me those permissions.

Long story short, I was able to manually migrate their site over, even though we were on the Basic Managed WordPress server using the steps enumerated in this article.

This article is only for my personal use, to help jog my memory if another client want to migrate their site to a more affordable solution. Please do not use this article for migrating any of your or client sites. If you do, you take full responsibility for anything that goes wrong, or right for that matter.

 

Manually Migrate a site to GoDaddy Basic Managed WordPress

In the, likely, event that the GoDaddy migration tool fails, use the steps below to manually move a website over from another server to GoDaddy’s Basic Managed WordPress server.

  1. Setup a default / empty WordPress install on your GoDaddy server and connect your domain, setup SSL certificate.
  2. Upload a zip file via SFTP or GoDaddy File Browser to the ‘wp-content‘ directory which contains the following directories from your site to be migrated:
    1. wp-content/plugins
    2. wp-content/themes
    3. wp-content/uploads
  3. Access your GoDaddy MySQL database using phpMyAdmin and import the database from the site to be migrated.
  4. Once the SQL is imported, update the *_options (table and set the site URL’s to your live, connected domain name.
    1. * signifies the table prefix you are using.
  5. Access the default / empty WordPress website backend and install the free WP File Manager plugin.
    1. https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-file-manager/
  6. Use WP File Manager to extract the contents of your previously uploaded zip file to the ‘wp-content‘ folder. Overwriting everything there.
  7. Using GoDaddy File Browser, open the ‘wp-config.php‘ file and copy contents to a new local wp-config.php file.
  8. Update this file as needed, in my case I simply needed to update the database prefix.
  9. Put the local copy of your revised wp-config.php file within a zip file and upload it (either via SFTP or GoDaddy File Browser) to the ‘wp-content‘ directory on the server.
  10. Using WP File Manager, extract the wp-config.php file to the wp-content folder, then within WP File Manager move the wp-config.php file to the root directory.
    1. This somehow bypasses GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress file protection allowing you to overwrite the default wp-config.php file.
  11. Congratulations! Your WordPress site migration should now be complete.
    1. Note, you’ll want to perform a search and replace on the database to update all of the site URLs.

 

Conclusion

I welcome your thoughts, questions or suggestions on my article on manually migrating a WordPress website over to GoDaddy’s Basic Managed WordPress server.

I am for hire should you require assistance with migrating your WordPress website to any server. Simply give me a call or contact me online.

You may support my work by sending me a tip using your Brave browser or by sending me a one time donation using your credit card.

Let me know if you found any errors within my article or if I may further assist you by answering any additional questions you may have.