Moving a cPanel Hosted WordPress Website from one WHM Managed Server to Another

Simplicity itself.

On the destination server, log in to WHM at www.yourdomain.com/whm. Once logged in, on the left you will see a Find searchbox; enter ‘copy’ in the searchbox, and below that you will see both “Copy an account from another server” and “Copy an account from another server with account password”. Choose the second option.

You will then be presented with the following fields to fill out, relating to the source (original) server that you are moving away from:

  • Domain Name
  • Server to copy from (IP or FQDN): (If possible this should be the same as the domain name)
  • Username to copy:
  • User’s password:

and a checkbox for whether to give the new account an IP address from the IP address pool on the receiving server (if you don’t want it on the shared primary IP).

To use this feature, the remote server must be runing cPanel version 3.0 or later.

As of cPanel 11.24.1, this feature will use the cPanel XML-API to generate a backup of the account and transfer it to this server for restore. This is much more reliable then the old method, and will deliver the same data as a transfer as root would.

Once you’re through filling in the fields, click the Copy Account button, and wait a short bit — you can view the progress of the transfer while it occurs (the page view will periodically update itself as it goes), and very shortly the site will have completed its transfer.

This process will move everything from the old server — database, email (including forwarders), subdomains, and the entire public_html/ directory contents. All passwords related to email and database accounts will remain the same.

Note that once this stage has successfully completed, you then will need to update your DNS information to point to the new server location.

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