Step-by-step guide to migrating WordPress to xCloud using both Migrate Guru and xCloud's native tool. Disable two-factor auth, security plugins, and cache before starting. Create a fresh xCloud instance, copy migration keys between sites, monitor progress, then verify the migrated site works before going live.
Chapters
I'd like to go over migrating a website from any other host to xCloud. We're going to use a plugin called Migrate Guru, and there are a few things that you need to know before you start your migration. We need to disable two-factor authentication if there is any, disable additional security like Cloudways bot protection or SiteGround Security Optimizer, Uninstall must-use plugins of hosts. It's pretty common for a host to have a must-use plugin that ties into their system somehow. You can log in with your file manager or SSH or FTP or whatever and simply remove them from the mu-plugins folder. Next, you need to clear cache and disable cache plugins like Object Cache Pro. And lastly, disable Wordfence or any other security plugins. Those are designed to prevent things like this, and you want to turn that off while you're doing this. So let's get started. The first step is to create a destination website on xCloud. So I'm going to go here to my xCloud account, and I'm going to add new site. We're going to pick a server. I only have one. And then instead of choosing migrate, we're going to create a new WordPress website. If you use the migrate, it uses a built-in system on xCloud, but because we're using Migrate Guru, we want to first install a plain old new WordPress website. We're going to choose, uh, default in this case and give it a site title. The site I'm going to migrate is called WP Wallpaper, so I'm going to call it that right now. That's going to get overwritten by the site once it gets migrated, but it'll be useful for now. I don't need a tag. I'm not going to go live right now, so we're going to choose a demo site. Then, uh, this is our demo site domain name. I don't need multi-site. I'm going to turn off indexing for now because I don't want Google to check out the site before it's ready. We do want full page caching and Redis object caching, so we're going to leave those on. I have email set up for my account, so I'm just going to leave that turned on. I don't have backups set up yet, so I'm going to leave this off. But if you do have backup set up, then you would turn this on. And then, uh, it doesn't matter which of these blueprints you select because it's going to get overwritten by the migrated site. But just for fun, I'm going to choose Gutenberg websites. I'm going to choose next, and it's building our new website. All right, now our new site is created. We need to first install the Migrate Guru plugin on this new site and then install it again on the other site. So we're going to install it in both places. All right, so I'm going to go to MagicLogin and we will go to plugins Add Plugin, and we'll go to Migrate Guru. There it is. So we install here and activate. And now I'm going to also go over here and install it here as well. Now we'll go back to our destination site. That's where we're going. And installed it on both, and we're going to find our migration key. So now we've copied a key from the destination site. So this is the site on xCloud. We go back to our source site and we say yes, I've installed it, and we paste the key here and it's validated. And we can put in an email address so that we get notifications of the process. And it says what we're going to do. The old site is WP Wallpaper and it's going to this site. So we click initiate migration and now it has begun. We scroll down, you can see the process here, and I just heard the notification that I got an email. All right, it says our site is migrated successfully. I can click a link here and go visit it just to make sure that it's going to the right place. Okay, I'm on my temporary domain name and it looks right. I click on a link, do I get— and I get the right page. So let's try logging in. Oh, okay, so it looks like the old thing because I use that modal login, but if I hit dashboard. Yes, this is what my admin should look like. This looks exactly like the old one. There's my MetaBox stuff, um, all my other plugins. So now I'm actually going to uninstall Migrate Guru because don't need it anymore. And there we are. I'm going to go back here and reload. It shouldn't look a whole lot different because, uh, we didn't really change any settings or anything, but our site is now migrated. I also want to show you how to migrate a site using xCloud's built-in migration tool. The first thing I want to show you though is some important rules here on the documentation. Disable 2FA if there are any. Only do this if your token migration fails. Disable Cloudflare bot fight mode because it'll try to stop your migration. Disable additional security like Cloudways bot protection or SiteGround security or anything else like that. Clear your cache and disable cache plugins like Object Cache Pro. Uninstall must-use plugins from hosts. Many hosts have custom plugins in the MU plugins folder, and those should be removed. And disable Wordfence, MalCare, any other security plugin you have, because again, they're going to try and stop somebody from taking your site away, but it's you and you want to do that. So, uh, we're going to start here with a source site I have one here conveniently called Source Site, and here it is set up in on one server in xCloud, and I'm going to migrate it to a different server at xCloud. And the first thing we're going to do is go to my dashboard and click New Site and choose a server. And here, instead of doing a new WordPress website, we're going to do migrate an existing WordPress website. So we need the URL for the existing site. So I'm going to copy that from here. And, uh, we have the option to do a migration to production or demo site. I don't ever recommend doing a migration to production. Because you want to check the site after migration to make sure it's right. Um, migrations are weird. Sometimes things happen. Uh, but I recommend always going to a demo site. You review it, then you go live later. So, uh, the new site will be called Icy Glade and click next. And up here we choose some default settings, uh, PHP version prefix, site user. Etc. I'm going to turn on caching. We're going to leave search and visibility off. We don't have a deploy script. We are going to create a new database for this, and we could set up site settings for backups. And here's our database credentials, and you can copy these and put them into a file somewhere if you need to. So now we click next, and now we need to install a plugin on the source site. And so I'm going to download it here, and it's called wp-xcloud-migration-latest. I already have it downloaded, so I'm going to go install it here. There it is. Activate. And then in the left, there's an xCloud Migration nav menu. So it needs a token, and we go back to here, and you can see here's the token. We click copy and paste it here. Verify, and it says it is verified. So now we say that I have added the authentication token and click Next. And you could do only the file system. I don't know why you'd want to if you're actually migrating a site, so I'm going to say everything. And here's what it's going to do. And I like all of that, so we'll click Start. All right, now our site has been migrated. I just got an email to let me know that, uh, full page cache is disabled because we're on a demo server. Caching is disabled on demo servers. And let's take a look and see how it looks. There we are. And so now our migration is complete.
