How To Migrate Your Wordpress Website Quickly & For Free using Migrate Guru

Key Takeaways

In this video, I'm going to show you how to migrate your website in just 16 clicks. I know one click would be much easier, but that's impossible. You have to log in to your site, you have to install a plugin, you have to copy the migration key. There's a bunch of clicks involved. But, this one only takes about 16 clicks, give or take a few. But, luckily, all those 16 clicks are super easy. I'm going to show you every single one in this video, and you'll be migrating your website in no time flat. Over the years, I've used many migration plugins, including UpdraftPlus, Duplicator, All-in-One Migration, WP Vivid. They all were great most of the time, but sometimes they fail. I'm going to show you today a plugin called Migrate Guru, which so far of me using it has worked every single time. So, I'm super happy with this performance. If you have a different experience from what I just described with this plugin, let us know in the comments down below. Hi, I'm Bjorn from WP Learning Lab. Now, let's get started. This is the website we're going to migrate. This is an actual live website that gets traffic, has plugins, has a theme. It's not the prettiest, but it has real stuff going on. So, it's not just migrating a demo site that's tiny just for the sake of showing a video. I'm showing the migration of an actual website. We're going to migrate it from its original URL, which is rvwithfamily.com, to this staging URL from SiteGround. And we're going to replace this existing site here. And it's going to be super quick. You do the same process for whatever you're migrating. You would install the plugin I'm going to install on the main site and the site you're migrating to. Then you add the transfer key, and you're done, basically. And for your transfer, you do the exact same thing. You'd go to your websites, both of them, the one you're transferring to and the one you're transferring from, install the same plugin, and do the same steps that I do to do your migration. So, let's go into the dashboard for both websites. We'll do rvwithfamily.com first. This is the site we want to transfer. Doesn't matter which one you do first, just pick one. Go to plugins, then add new plugin. And we're going to search for Migrate Guru. This is the one I want right here. This is powered by BlogVault. BlogVault is one of the most popular and most powerful and best migration plugins I've ever used, but Blog Vault is also not free. Migration Guru uses the same back-end as Blog Vault, but it's free. So, we're going to use that one for this video. Going to click on install now. By the way, Cloudways also uses Blog Vault. They're a big hosting company. They do all their migrations with Blog Vault. So, clearly it's a good plugin and it works really well. Let's activate this guy. Now, we're going to stop here and go to our other website and install it as well. Let's go into the dashboard. This is the website that we're transferring to. Plugins and then add new. And then we're going to search for Migrate Guru again. Install it. Activate it. Okay, now we're on the same page on both sites. And now here we're going to enter our email address. Yes, they will probably email you. Click on I agree to Blog Vault's terms and conditions and privacy policy. Then click on migrate. And here it shows a bunch of different hosts. Depending on which host, you can choose the one you want. I recommend you skip all that. Just go to other hosts. Here we enter the Migrate Guru migration key. This is the key that we get from the destination website, which is this one right here. Going to go down to the very bottom of this page. Click on migration key, the down arrow to open it. Click on copy key. Paste it right in here. Then click on migrate. And now it's migrating. Look at the timestamp on the top right. It's 11:35 a.m. I will come back when it's done so we can see how long it takes. One thing to note is this website, rvwithfamily.com, is a real website with lots of plugins, lots of stuff going on. It gets traffic and it's a real website. And so, it might take up to 15 minutes. So, I'll pause this video. When I come back, we'll take a look at the timestamp and we'll see how long it took. And we're all done. It is 11:46. So, that took 11 minutes to migrate. And we got a success message. I've never had a failed message using Migrate Guru or Blog Vault, which is what powers Migrate Guru. It just works every time. No matter how big the site is. This one's under 500 megabytes, but I've migrated sites that are in the gigabytes of size. It takes longer, but it always works. So, the moment of truth, let's go to our site that we're migrating to. Let's go Actually, we we should be able to refresh right here and see everything change in here. And yeah, everything changed. We got to log in again because the user credentials, the username and password changed to the original site. And we got the favicon up here of the little RV. We got go to RVing with family. So, it looks like the migration went successfully. Enter my username and password and log in and the dashboard is now fully filled out, which is like the original site. Let's go to the front end to see how that looks. Close all these and it looks just like the original. Let's go to the front end on the original and they are identical. When I switch back and forth, you can't even see a difference, not even in alignment or anything. Let's click into a blog post, see if the content is there. And it is. There are no pictures in this one except for the featured image. There's a picture. Classy picture for the video and it pulled it in is the point and it all works. And so, that is how I migrate websites with just a few clicks super easily. And the plugin we used is Migrate Guru. It's powered by BlogVault, which is trusted by many, many big hosts including WP Engine, Cloudways, Pantheon and a bunch of others as their main migration tool. So, you're in good company when you use this plugin. If you got value from this video, let me know by liking and subscribing and then check out this video right up here, which is a full walk through of BlogVault, which is the technology that Migrate Guru runs on. And then check out this video down here, which is all about speeding up your website once you've migrated it. I'm Bjorn from WP Learning Lab. Till next time, keep crushing it and I will see you in the next video.