Category Archives:
Tutorial & Guides

Wordpress is simply too good to refuse when you want to start a website for quick and professional operation. But you might want to migrate from other platforms where you have worked for long time such as blogger, tumblr and wordress.com service. This article provides detailed guidance on how to migrate your contents to hosted wordpress site from blogger, tumblr and wordpress.com service. Share it if you found it helpful.

Please note, all our guidance below solely focus on web contents but not considering other factors like search engine. If you have sufficient traffic on old site and would like to redirect all to your hosted domain, you might put an announcement or send out newsletters to people so they can get notified for the move.

Migration from Blogger to WordPress

The migration is pretty straight, the wordpress has provided us the tool to simplify the process. But before we start the moving, it's necessary to get a nice domain and wordpress hosting service. We highly recommend to check out this best wordpress hosting page for best selections. After hosting service is ready to go, get your domain configured via basic wordpress installation. You can do this manually or take advantage of auto installer like softaculous. The process could be done in few minutes since everything is automatic. Now we're going to start the move

1. Login to wordpress admin panel, click "Tools" then click "Import". Here's a list of options, click "Blogger" which is on top of the list.
2. It requires us to get the plugin "blogger-importer" installed. Click the button to proceed.
3. Click "Authorize" to allow wordpress access to your google account.
4. Once authorized, you will get a list of your Blogger Blogs. Select the blog you wish to import and the process takes just few seconds.

Now, all you blogger contents are moved over. If you heavily consider search engine friendly. You might take a look at this article from Amit Agarwal. Here's a video show about the entire process

Migration From Tumblr to WordPress

To begin, refer to wordress dashboard, then click "Tools" then "Import" and confirm the "Tumblr Importer" plugin installation. You will be asked to enter Tumblr account login email & password. Fill out then click "Connect" to proceed.

The importer will grab over everything automatically and we can watch the entire progress via frequent refresh. Once the process done, you will get email notification.

Note: there're people who have applied custom domain name for their tumblr blogs. For this case, we need to disable this feature first via tumblr dashboard > Settings > un-check the "Use a Custom Domain".

Migration from WordPress.com

Importing from wordpress.com is almost the same as above. Because it's managed by wordpress, we get much better experience. Just go ahead to try out and you'll be surprised about the speedy procedure.

No matter if you have imported from which service. You never want to loose connection to your visitors. Thus we highly suggest you put a notice on your old blogs and guide them to check your hosted site. Under some circumstance, you may also send out newsletter to followers so they can get notifed in time.

Why do the migration?

Simply because we need more control over the site and do further customization. No matter which free service we use, there&'re various limitation in using it. But things are different when we host the website from our own hosting space. There we have full access to each website files and backend database. It's also a MUST when we need do business on website. We can't put everything at a free service for any reason.

It's absolutely nice journey to work with wordpress for it's super friendly and powerful design. But some day you found your wordpress site needs better support and have to move to new server space, you might be not sure to begin with. This article guides you step by step on how to migrate a wordpress site to new space for different situations. You should be able to handle any type wordpress site migration by following our guidance.

Wordpress migration without domain change

This should be the most popular migration where we just need to move existing site to new server space. Following are full steps of the process. Here we take cpanel account for example, other control panel softwares provide similar features.

1. Login to your cpanel center and navigate to your wordpress installation directory. If its your primary site, it's normally located under "Public_html" which is the root directory.

2. Select all files/folders on top navigation bar and right click anywhere on file list then select "Compress". By default it will take the first folder name for the compressed file. You can leave it as it is or just give it a good name you can easily remember. Once compression done, right click on the file name and choose download to save it on your computer drive.

3. Now, let's go ahead to backup your wordpress database. Go back to cpanel home and navigate to "Database" section then choose "phpMyAdmin". Now you're redirected to phpmyadmin panel. Click on the database which your wordpress site is using. You probably not sure which database it is if there're multiple ones, especially when you installed the wordpress site via auto installers like softaculous. For this case, just go back to your file wordpress installation directory and open the file "wp-config.php", there's a line "DB_NAME", your database name is placed there.

4. Select all tables then choose "Export" from the dropdown list in the bottom page. It will give you two options, quick and custom. Leave it as default and click "Go" button. It will prompt up a window for downloading. That's your database file, click save to save it on your computer.

Now, you have get full backup of your wordpress website files and mysql database. We need to put it online from your new server space. So here're detailed steps

1. Upload the compressed file to your new server space via new ftp credentials(be sure to upload to the exact directory where you would like to put up the wordpress site). Navigate to file manager and locate the file we just uploaded, then right click on the file and choose "Extract". It will ask where you like to extract all files to. By default it will unzip to current directory, if you would like to put under other directories, just specify the path then press "Extract File(s)" to proceed.

2. Now, navigate to control panel "Database" section and click the "MySQL Databases" icon. Under create new database section, fill out your desired database name to create a new database. Scroll down to create a user/password then assign it to your database.

3. Go back to control panel Database section and click "phpMyAdmin", Click the database we just created. Click the "Import" icon from top navigation bar and it will bring us to import wizard. On the new page, click "browse" to choose the database backup file we just saved then click "Go" to have all data uploaded. Wait some time for the wizard to complete.(Note: if your have a large size database, you can upload the file to file manager directory then contact hosting support to import because it will be timed out easily on customer end)

Now you have restored everything to new server space. Bypass DNS as we suggested from previous article and test if everything working properly. If yes, find a good time to change over DNS servers. If not, fix everything before you make the change.

UPDATE: we can use following sql queries to replace everything in short time other than do it manually.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace( post_content, 'old.com','new.com');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = replace(comment_content, 'old.com', 'new.com');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url = replace(comment_author_url, 'old.com', 'new.com');
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace( guid, 'old.com','new.com');

Wordpress migration with domain change

To many people, website means business. If our site is alreayd crawled by search engines with good traffic, of course we want to drive the traffic to new site. It's big pain to let search bots to crawl our new domain from scratch. For this purpose, we need to configure 301 redirects from all old urls to new site. In .htaccess file, we need to change to following:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^www.old.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.new.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

If our server is windows based, we need to add following to wp-blog-header.php from website root(after the first <?php sign)

if (strtolower($_SERVER[‘SERVER_NAME’])!='newsite.com')
{
$URIRedirect=$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’];
if(strtolower($URIRedirect)=="/index.php")
{
$URIRedirect="/";
}
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location:http://newsite.com'.$URIRedirect);
exit();
}

Now, your old site URLs will be redirected to new URLs and business will keep alive!

The first cancellation in 2014~ This morning, I received an email about hosting account cancellation complaint. Their hosting provider refused to give backup data because their website is bringing down hosting server.. We're still helping to retrieve their data since it's crucial for their business. At the meanwhile, we decide to provide a detailed guidance on how to cancel your hosting account properly in case some readers might encounter in future.

Normally, it's pretty streight to have account closed and get money back. You just need to send a support ticket and the person in charge will follow up upon your request. Sometimes they will try to keep you with their service by offering extra bonus such as one month free hosting or other products they have. But if you really want to leave their service, just say no to all their offer. Following are guidance and tips to close your account in right direction.

Make full account backup to local computer

Why we put this rule on top? Simply because we're living and no longer need the service. Just in case the company close our service too fast, we must ensure our data is in safe place.Before you send out any complaint/request for account cancellation, make sure you have generated full account backup. In this way you can ensure all files are under control so you can host them anywhere you liked. Most hosting service provides backup tools, especially for those cpanel hosting providers, we can easily generate full backup by following the wizard.

Setup new service from another company first

It's always wise to have the new service running before you close the old one. Because your website is your business, you don't want to see it's offline when you're looking for new hosting provider. If you new service is up, you can transfer over data quickly at a proper time and reduce the website downtime as much as possible.

Transfer crucial service first

Migrating account to new company includes lots of stuff sometimes. Especially when your domain and hosting were registered with the same company. If you decide to leave, it's recommended to have everything transfered out. Because many hosting companies are actually reselling domain registration so most of the time they can not handle domain related requests and always ask people to check with the actual registrar. If you're dealing with such service, make sure to transfer out first to prevent potential issues. I believe you would not like to contact back for problem fixing in future.

Cancel before account expiration date

You should move at least one month before account expiration. In this way you get enough time to transfer everything and you don't have to worry about unused fund in account.

Send cancellation request via right channel

There're multiple connections to hosting support. But account cancellation requests are always handled by accounting department thus you must select the right channel. Also, since it requires some time and further communication about the process, ticket system is the best place to send your cancellation request. Normally, you still have access to support area even account closed. So in case there're problems in future you can always refer to support area. Other channels like email or online chat is not suitable for this kind inquiry.

Wait some time for money back

Let's say you have half year's service not used and you should get refund based the company policy. But please be patient when you wait for the money. Based the payment method we choose, it might take up to 7 business days to see it from our bank account and there's no notice at all based our experience.

So here is the right order to close your old service then get it alive on new hosting server: Generate full backup > Open new hosting service from another company > Transfer over all services > Send cancellation request. We hate to deal with the process but we must do it correctly when there's need.

We don't want to pay too much for hosting service but we do wish high performance on website. Looks crazy but how can we get such deal? We have done a bit research and compiled the following 9 tips on how to host a high performance website with a cheap hosting service.

It's not a secret your server is being oversold because you pay just one or two bucks per month. The hosting company has to be profitable from their low cost plan. Most of the time we can't rely on hosting support to optimize on server end. Instead, we have to apply necessary changes on our website and make use of existing service to speed up our websites.

Use static page

It doesn't mean we can't host dynamic website via cheap hosting. It requires us to convert our web pages to static one so as to reduce read/write to webserver and database. If we work with cms softwares, there're always various modules/plugins to automate this process. If it's programmed by web developer, we should submit the idea so they can follow up properly. Normally, static web page responses 3 times faster more than dynamic.

Use cache

The purpose is to keep a cache of your website properties from server or local computer. Nest time when the same person browse to our site again, the browser doesn't have to download everything from scratch from hosting space so page speed is greatly improved. Cache plugin is popularly used for some leading cms softwares such as wordpress. For example the W3TotalCache developer guarantees 10 times faster after used the solution.

Css optimization

There're two points about CSS optimization, Coding and compression. On coding level, we need to check carefully about different declarations, especially those duplicated declaration such as the following:

h1 { color: black; }  
p { color: black; }

We can combine the two lines to a single one as h1, p { color: black; } so when there's http requests it will reduce the calling time.

As about compression, it means to remove blank space in css file as much as possible and reduce the overall file size. Especially for those big css files, it's great help. We can seek help from existing tools like www.csscompressor.com. But we should use it carefully because it might cause problems in same case.

Js file optimization

Js is used by almost every website and some sites are heavily js based. In order to optimize such file, we can consider in following ways:

Quote from existing js base. There're lots of js libraries and many files are used in common. We don't have to upload every js file to hosting space. Instead, we can call it directly from online base such as Google library
Compress js file size. You should consider to compress it if it's big size. There're lots of online toos to do the work.
Put less important js files to page bottom. Because page header is always firstly loaded when http request occurs, loading speed can be improved a lot if we put less important js files to page bottom.

Picture optimization

Pictures always take lots of space and takes longer to load. When there's bad internet or server connection, we should try to reduce its size as much as possible. We don't recommend to upload pictures directly from our camera because it's really big. We should reduce its size first before uploading, there're lots of tools to use such as photoshop or any other resize solutions.

Delayed page loading

It should be used when there're long pages. Delayed page loading technique will just load the first screen for fast displaying. Rest contents will be loaded when you scroll down the page. It's extremely useful for those pictures based sites. If you created the site via wordpress, we highly recommend using WP images lazy loading plugin. There're also lots of jquery guidance on how to realize this function, just do your research if you program by yourself.

Enable gzip

Gzip is a server process that essentially compresses your files on the fly before transmission to the user. It should be enabled by default. But in case it's not enabled, we can manually activate this function via htaccess. Just put the following code to your htaccess in website root

#Gzip
<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript text/javascript
</ifmodule>
#End Gzip

Use cdn service

Using CDN will greatly speed up your site loading. Because cdn will delivery website files to different networks so when user send http requests to website, it will be downloaded from the most nearby network nodes. The most populary and widely used cdn service cloudflare is highly recommended because their free plan is good enough for personal sites.

Testing

Testing all your work and check if there's anything to be improved. Here we highly suggest Pagespeed insights which is provided by google. It's an online tool that will analyze your page and provide properiate suggestions. If you use firefox explorer, there's a great plugin called "firebug" which helps your web page optimization on the fly. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Your website should get much better loading response after all above optimization. It's not so easy to work with a cheap hosting service, so you should evaluate seriously if you really have to use it. If you need a high performance server directly, we suggest check out a reputable shared or business web hosting plan.

When you host a blog site, price and usability are mostly concerned. Because we don't have to deal with lots of technical stuff for blog, simplity of the service is crucial. This posting provides side by side explanation of justhost service and find why it's good for blog website purpose. This includes hosting compatibility, usability, price and support plus existing user experience. If you're considering to host a blog site with this company, make sure to follow our guidance.

Blog compatibility

Justhost provides shared, VPS and dedicated server plans and all hosting servers are CentOS with betterlinux optimization. The justhost servers are fully optimized to work with any php blog script. Those popular blog softwares like wordpress and b2evolution are fully compatible and can be setup by few clicks away. Every clients be able to create unlimited blog sites and mysql databases so there's no problem at all in case you want to separate your personal and company blogs in same sapce.

Hosting Usability

Customized cpanel control panel is provided for justhost service. Unlike a standard control panel from most linux hosting providers, the justhost tech team has fully redesigned it to simplify the process of your hosting experience. Except for the main body navigation, everything is customized. Those frequent accessed services like billing, domain manager, knowledge base and support center are fully integrated in header section so you can navigating more easily. Take a quick look at the layouts as below

As we see, cpanel is now only a part of the powerful system. The main account services are highlighted on top. You don't have to leave your current page in order to check other services. Here users can register new domain name or add new hosting accounts directly. It simply redefined the cpanel software and very likely to be used by other endurance brands like hostgator or bluehost.

Blog is just a simple support from justhost service. Their simplescripts installer has a gallery of more than 100 popular scripts we can choose to work with. All php blog scripts are included in the gallery. Just fill out the needed information then everything is ready in few seconds. Instead just too get your blog running on their server, the control panel provides a great function called "Site backup pro" which we can use to backup our data easily. In case anything goes wrong, we can urgently restore the most recent backup. Of course, we can automate the backup via cron jobs.

In a word, the custom cpanel center greatly saved clients effort in using their service. Their people configured all functions based real user needs and do continuous improvements.

Affordable Price

How much means affordable? The justhost $2.95/mo price clearly defined how cheap is cheap. With this price, clients receive unlimited space, unlimited websites hosting and free domain registration! Besides all these leading features, every client will receive $100 google credits, $50 facebook/twitter credits and $25 yahoo credits. If you would like to promote your blog site with those sites, it's absolutely great offer for money saving.

Besides the cheap shared hosting, justhost also provides very affordable upgrade options to vps and dedicated server hosting. All their servers are located in Utah which is setup by previous bluehost group. The data center is configured to meet the next 30 years IT requirements. Unlike most data centers, the justhost data center is completely based cloud technologies. All your server will be created instantly once payment confirmed. Means there's no waiting for your upgrade or new registration.

Support experience

Justhost provides guaranteed 24*7 professional support. They have several contact department configured so people can connect to the proper channel for fast solution. Billing, sales and tech support are all running around the clock so you can call in any time when there's such needs. Besides all man power support, justhost teach provides detailed FAQ and guidance knolwdege base where we can check directly from hosting control panel. Their knowledge base is updated frequently based ongoing experience.

Based all above explanation, justhost provides more than our needs to host a blog site. No matter if you need personal or enterprise solution, you can always get the right plan for the best price.

Check out justhost full hosting features on www.justhost.com