There are several different ways to migrate your WordPress site to RunCloud, some easier than others, depending on your preferences and technical skills. We will outline some of the most common methods below, and provide you with steps for each one.

Ask RunCloud Support

By far the easiest way to migrate is by using our migration service. When you are migrating to RunCloud, our support team will migrate your first web app for FREE!

If you want to migrate more than one site, you can apply for migration. Our support team will ask for information to assess your site, after which we will quote you a fair fee for the migration. You will then have a choice to proceed only if you agree.

Once your payment has been received, a team of experts at RunCloud will handle your migration process – and notify you when it’s finished.

Migration Plugins

Another easy, and fast way to migrate WordPress to RunCloud is to use a Migration plugin that automates the entire migration process.

These plugins can handle any size of WordPress site, even multi-site networks and 200 GB sites. They also takes care of URL rewriting, serialised data, and search and replace.

These plugins usually create a backup of your site on your source host, which you can then restore on your server connected to RunCloud. Some of them may have limitations on the size of the backup or the destination host, so you need to check their compatibility before using them.

Migrate Guru is a free, fully automated WordPress migration plugin that works well with RunCloud. Follow the steps below to learn how to use Migrate Guru to move your site to RunCloud.

(Note: RunCloud is not affiliated with Migrate Guru in any way)

Step 1: Sign up at RunCloud and Create A New Server

First, you’ll need to sign up for a RunCloud account and connect a server. You can choose from various providers such as DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, etc., or you can even use a local machine.

Once you install the RunCloud Agent, RunCloud will automatically install and configure the necessary software for your server.

Read our Knowledgebase article on how to connect a server to RunCloud to get started.

Step 2: Install WordPress with RunCloud

Next, you’ll need to install a blank WordPress site on your server connected to RunCloud. This will be the destination for your migration. You can do this by going to the “Web Application” tab in your server dashboard and then clicking “Create Web App“.

Choose the “1 Click WordPress” option, and enter the following details:

  • Web Application Name: A name for your site (e.g., My Site).
  • Domain Name: The domain name of your site (e.g., mysite.com). It should be the same as the site you want to migrate.
  • Web Application Owner: Create new user or leave it as default.
  • PHP Version: Choose PHP 7.4 or higher.
  • Web Application Stack: Choose Native NGINX for better performance. If you need to use .htaccess files, choose NGINX + Apache2 Hybrid.
  • WordPress (title, username, etc): Enter some dummy information, we will overwrite this later.
  • Database: Leave this as default.

Click “Create Web Application” and wait for RunCloud to install WordPress on your server. You can see the installation progress in the Web Application Summary.

Step 3: Install a Migration Plugin on Your Existing Site

Next, you’ll need to migrate your existing WordPress site to RunCloud. You can use a free plugin such as Migrate Guru or All in One WP for this purpose. In this article, we will show you how to migrate WordPress to RunCloud with Migrate Guru in a few simple steps.

Go to the WordPress site that you want to migrate from your existing host. This is the source site that has all of your content and settings. Make sure you have a backup of your site before proceeding, just in case something goes wrong.

Then, go to Plugins → Add New and search for Migrate Guru. Install and activate the plugin from WordPress.org.

Once installed, go to the Migrate Guru tab in your source site’s dashboard and enter your email address. Click “Migrate Site” to start the migration process. On the next screen, select “Other” host.

Step 4: Open Your Destination Site

On this screen, you need to enter the Migration key of your destination site. Go back to the site that we created in step 2 and install the Migrate Guru plugin. Copy the key shown below “Your Migration Key“.

Step 5: Start Migration

Go back to your original WordPress site. You will see an option to enter your migration key. If you don’t see this, make sure you have selected “I Have Migration Key” button on the top.

After entering the migration key, you can leave rest of the settings as they are and click the “Migrate” button.

The plugin will now start copying and moving your site from your existing host to your RunCloud server. Depending on the size of your site, this may take some time.

You don’t need to do anything else until Migrate Guru completes the migration. Once the migration is complete, you can log in to your new site using the same credentials for your old site.

Once Migrate Guru finishes the migration, you should test to make sure that everything works fine on your new site before changing your DNS records.

Manual Migration

This method gives you more control and flexibility over the migration process, but it also requires some technical skills and attention to detail. If you are not comfortable with using FTP, MySQL, and handling WordPress files and databases, you may want to consider using a plugin like Migrate Guru instead.

However, if you are confident with your abilities and prefer to do it manually, here are the step-by-step instructions for manually migrating your WordPress website to RunCloud:

Step 1: Export Your WordPress Database from Your Source Host

The first step is to export your WordPress database from your source host. This is where all of your site’s content and settings are stored.

To export your WordPress database, you need to access your source host’s cPanel or phpMyAdmin. You can usually find these tools in your hosting account dashboard.

Once you are in cPanel or phpMyAdmin, look for the database that is associated with your WordPress site. You can find the name of your database in your wp-config.php file, which is located in the root folder of your WordPress installation.

Select the database and click on the Export option. Choose the Quick option and click Export. This will download and save the exported SQL file to your computer.

Step 2: Create a New WordPress app Your RunCloud Server

The next step is to install a WordPress application on your server connected to RunCloud. We will overwrite the data of this application. If your old site uses a custom table prefix, you need to include that in the Database section while creating the app.

After creating the WordPress app, you need to find its database credentials. You can get this from wp-config.php file. In the left menu, click the RunCloud file manager and open the wp-config.php file. In that file, you will see the following lines:

define( ‘DB_NAME’, ‘mysite_db’ );
define( ‘DB_USER’, ‘mysite_user’ );
define( ‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘mysite_pass’ );

Note down the username and password mentioned in the file. In the above example, the username is mysite_user and the password is mysite_pass.

Step 3: Import the Exported Database and Copy Your WordPress Files via FTP or cPanel

The third step is to import the exported database from your source host to your new database on RunCloud. You also need to copy your WordPress files, such as wp_content, wp_includes, etc. from your source host to your RunCloud server via FTP or cPanel.

To import the exported database, you need to access your RunCloud server’s phpMyAdmin. If you don’t have phpMyAdmin installed, you can do so easily from the RunCloud dashboard.

Once you’ve opened the phpMyAdmin webpage, enter the database credentials of the new WordPress installation that we noted down in step 2. If you did everything correctly, you should see the database of your newly created WordPress application in the left sidebar.

We are going to delete all existing tables in the database and replace them with the database that we exported earlier. In the phpMyAdmin dashboard, select your database and click on “Check All” to select all tables.

Next, select Drop from the menu to delete all tables and press “Yes“. After the tables have been deleted, you will see a success message like this:

After deleting the tables, go to the Import tab. Choose the SQL file that you exported from your source host and click Import. This will import all of your site’s content and settings to your new database on RunCloud.

Optionally, if you are planning to change the domain name of your site, you can edit the highlighted tuples in the wp_options table.

That’s it! You have successfully migrated your WordPress site from another control panel to RunCloud. Enjoy the security and convenience of using RunCloud!

Post Migration Steps

The final step will be to update your DNS records so that they point your domain name to your new site at RunCloud. You can do this by logging into your domain registrar account (where you bought your domain name from), and changing the “A record” of your domain name to the IP address of your server at RunCloud.

If you are using the RunCloud’s Cloudflare integration, you can find this IP address in your RunCloud dashboard under Server > Settings > IP Address.

Once you’ve updated your DNS records, it may take some time for the changes to propagate across the internet. Read our in-depth blog post to learn How To Speed Up DNS Propagation.

You can use a tool such as DNS Checker to check if your domain name is resolving to your new site at RunCloud. Once your DNS records are updated, you should be able to access your WordPress site on RunCloud.

After updating the domain, you can configure your site URL under the “General Settings” tab in the RunCloud dashboard, and then proceed to installing TLS certificates, configure automated backups, and harden your server.

If you have any other questions or need help – please feel free to get in touch with our 24/7 support team. We’re here to help!