Migrate fast and with confidence

Migrate Guru is one of two things you need to perform a smart, fast site migration and leave behind a surprising amount of excess baggage.

Migrate Guru migrates your content, your plugins (active or inactive), and your active theme, however you have customized it. All it requires is WordPress on the other end, and a valid IP address. If you haven’t set up everything you need, Migrate Guru will tell you and give you a chance to fix it.

Best of all, it makes a copy. You still have your old site to which you can fall back if something goes horribly wrong.

The only things I left behind were the plugin WP Super Cache (likely obsolete anyway) and a bunch of themes I had installed but never used.

Migrate Guru won’t solve all your hosting problems. For that you have to make a good choice of hosts, which is likely why you are migrating to begin with. But it will accomplish one big step in migration–and Blogvault’s checklist after it’s done will remind you of other moving-in details you’ll need to attend to, same as if you were moving your household. Migrate Guru is the mover–and it is the equivalent of a careful mover who packs up everything you need and then unpacks it at the other end.

I could wish Blogvault had an e-mail migration solution that was just as easy as this. The only reason they don’t, I suppose, is that migrating e-mail is (or can be) a lot simpler, depending on how many e-mail accounts you’re transferring over. If you have more than, say, twenty-five accounts, chances are you’re buying a hosting plan that includes full account migration in the price, thus making that a moot point. To migrate fewer than that, you just re-create your e-mail accounts on the other end, and then archive (usually TAR or ZIP or TAR.GZ or TAR.BZ2) the mail directory at source, download it to a space you control (typically your own computer), and then upload it at the other end and extract it with full write-in/overwrite permissions. I’m not at all sure Blogvault could improve on that.

But for migrating the WordPress code and database, you can’t beat Migrate Guru. It will copy what you need to copy, and in the proper order. Then your site is ready for you to co-ordinate the name server change and the issuance of an SSL certificate (if that’s part of the package).