An year ago, I moved a self-hosted WordPress site to WordPress.com for certain reasons, and the migration was easier than I expected. The website had more than 2,000 blog posts and still, everything was so seamless and straightforward — I just had to install the JetPack plugin on both the sites (the old one and the new one, on WordPress.com subdomain) and start the migration.
After starting the migration, it took almost 30-45 mins to complete the migration — the plugin kept doing its job in the background. It required no input from my side. And as soon as I saw the “migration complete” message, I just had to delete my existing website and attach the domain (the old one) to the WordPress.com subdomain.
And it was done!
But recently, I had to move a self-hosted WordPress website from one server to another server and also from one domain name to another domain name. And since it was just an one time thing, I wasn’t willing to spend money on migration plugins (and JetPack wasn’t an option since both sites were self-hosted).
The one plan that I had in mind is that I would download the backup of the entire site on my computer and then upload the file to the new site. I chose the WP All-in-One Migration plugin and downloaded a backup of the site, which was around 290 MB, as shown in the below screenshot.
After download the backup from the source site, I installed the same migration plugin on the destination site. But it wouldn’t let me upload/import the backup file because it says the limit is only 256 MB in the free account. I even tried tweaking my wp-config.php and .htaccess files to increase the upload limits, but it just didn’t work.
I started looking for alternative solutions for this workflow, and finally, I found WPvivid as the plugin of my choice (after trying 3 different plugins). Now, WPvivid is my new favorite backup plugin of choice, especially, if you regularly keep a local copy of the site’s backup.
I am sure there must be a few really good backup plugins, but for now, I am settling with this one.
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