Migrating a WordPress website from one host to another involves quite a few technical steps and could be a daunting job if you don’t know how to handle them. Migrate Guru, developed by BlogVault, is a fully-automated WordPress plugin that is aiming to be the easiest, fastest and most reliable way to migrate WordPress websites. It’s completely FREE and simplifies the difficulties involved in WordPress migrations and transfers the sites between hosts without any manual work, additional add-ons or tools. All the heavy lift working is performed and executed on Migrate Guru’s own servers so there is no risk to your current sites.
How to use Migrate Guru to perform a migration
It’s fairly easy to follow, even though you don’t have the knowledge how WordPress works.
- Install WordPress and get it ready for the new host destination.
- Install Migrate Guru plugin from Plugins section in your browser.
- Once installed, go to Migrate Guru section, pick one of the hosting providers listed there and enter all the details.
- Click Migrate to start the process.
For example, if my site is moving to WP Engine, I click WPEngine option from the list, enter details such as Email, Destination Site URL, and sFTP host address/username/password. And hit Migrate button.
If your new hosting provider is not on the pre-defined list, you can always choose cPanel option if available. If you are moving to a VPS powered WordPress, you will most likely use FTP option to migrate your site.
Verdict
Compare to other backup and restore plugins, Migrate Guru does look quite simple. I like the way how it handles the data transfer. Instead of moving directly one end to another, it takes all the migration process on their own servers to protect your site from crashing because of the overload. Because of this, it’s capable of handling big sites as large as 200 GB data. And that eliminates another common migration failure due to the size of the site.
However, I haven’t got a real chance to test it in real life but certainly will give it a spin if I need to move any of my WordPress sites from one host to another.