Installing WP for Existing Website

If the site was migrated, the host would already have WordPress to run it, wouldn’t it?
Did your developer give you the login credentials? That’s all you need: login and make your changes.

Yes, the host site does offer WP as a download in cPanel. It’s the actual installation of WP I’m having trouble understanding as I’m not building a website, I’m trying to install WP so it picks up my website so I can make changes and additions. I hope that makes sense.

No, that does not make sense.
Perhaps if you define what you mean by “The site was then migrated over to a web host.”
To me, that means that WordPress was installed and the data was put in the database and it is being served by that host. Do you mean something different?

A web developer created a website for us on their servers using WP. After they completed it, a web host company (WHC) migrated the files from the web developers servers to the web host servers. I can see all the files in my File Manager under public_html, however I don’t see WordPress there. Perhaps, it is there but I can’t find a way to open it and access my site.

If it is normal WordPress, the only files would be WordPress itself (PHP files) and uploaded images. All the data is in the database. But they might have converted it to static HTML and copied that. If that’s the case, you don’t have a WordPress site, you have a static site built using WordPress.

All the files I can see there are PHP files, I don’t see html files. Those files were simply transferred from one server to another. The latter being my host site in which I’m trying to access using WP, but I don’t know how to install it and have the program pick up those PHP files as opposed to it thinking I’m creating a brand new website.

If they actually installed it and it is showing your site (the data is in the databse, not the files), then you just need the login credentials, because WordPress is already in use.

Where do I login?

If WordPress is in the root folder, it’s yourdomain/wp-admin but if it’s in a folder then you have to put the folder like yourdomain/wpfolder/wp-admin

There is a folder called wp-admin in the public_html folder, but no file with that name.

Since there is no WordPress in the root folder ‘wp-admin’, can we conclude that WordPress is not installed and needs to be installed? If so, this is the question I have been seeking an answer, how should I go about it?

There is no “WordPress” file or folder. It sounds to me like you have it installed already. If you use the URL like domain/wp-admin/ you should get a login screen. You just have to have something to put in there to actually use WordPress to change the site.

Hi there,

If you want to transfer your WordPress Website from one server to another server then you should have two things. One all your WordPress Website files and second Database of your website.

Now on the new server transfer all your website files in public_html folder. After this step create a new database on server and import your website database in it. You also need to make some changes in wp-config.php file. Now you can access your website by entering your domain name and you can access your WordPress Website Dashboard by visiting yourdomainname/wp-admin.

The last step is to install a plugin to replace old url to new url.

Hope this helps you ??

Thank you amitmhr and special thanks to Joy for your help and patience. I was unable to ever see a login screen, hence my frustration. I too thought that it should just work. It’s finally working, have access and am learning how to use WP and DIVI, which is the theme the web developer used to build our site. So far, I’ve managed to fix a text issue and replace a few images. Our site is bonsaitree.ca

Thanks again, folks.
Jim