Top WordPress Migration Plugins (Free & Paid)
Does slow loading time and more downtime often occur on your website? It could leave a way for your audience to select competitor websites. This may happen when your requirement exceeds the current hosting plan. If all these things make you unhappy with the hosting provider’s support, this will be the right time to think about website migration. That’s great if you’ve already decided to migrate.
Website migration is a crucial step that brings significant changes and benefits to your website like website speed increase, better user experience, and security enhancements. But it also comes with a lot more challenges. If migration is not done correctly, it may lead to website traffic loss.
However, the right migration plugin can reduce your headache, simplify the process, and save you more time.
In this blog, we’ll explore the best wordpress migration plugins, both free and paid options, their features, limitations, pricing, etc.,
Top WordPress Migration Plugins
Migrating a website is a complex process that involves database backups, file transfers, and configuration changes. Thanks to the migration plugin it helps to automate these tasks and makes the process faster, easier, and less prone to errors.
Now, let’s dive into some of the most popular WordPress migration plugins, both free and premium separately.
Free WordPress Migration Plugins
1. Duplicator
Duplicator is the go-to choice for many users who want a user-friendly interface and easy migration experience. With over 1 million active installs and 30 million downloads on wordpress.org, this plugin offers migration and backup features. You can migrate, copy, and clone the website to different locations. It lets you backup your entire site or specific parts of the site. This plugin can efficiently handle wordpress migrations and backups with zero downtime.
This plugin allows you to pull your live site to a local host for development purposes. Additionally, you can duplicate your live site to create a staging site, making it easy to bundle up an entire site.
If you have a large website, it might not be suitable for you as it limits the file size to 50MB in its free version.
Most of the basic features are included in its free version. If you want more features you need to upgrade to the pro version. You can learn more about its pro features in the upcoming part.
2. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is primarily a backup plugin that involves migration capabilities. It’s beginner-friendly and has basic backup and migration features. You can choose this plugin if you prioritize backup over migration. But it offers a basic website migration solution. Standing out with 3 million active installations, using UpdraftPlus, you can backup, restore, and migrate your website. Apart from the manual backup, it offers a schedule backup feature in its free version that many plugins offer as a premium feature.
Back up your website files and store the backups in locations like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon s3, Rackspace cloud, FTP, dreamobjects, openstack swift, or email. UpdraftPlus makes the restoration process simply done with fewer clicks. You just simply need to choose which one you want to restore(plugins, themes, or database).
You can migrate to a different host, server, or domain. Start by downloading the database, plugins, themes, etc., from your source or old site and upload them to your new site. Download UpdraftPlus for free.
This plugin requires a more manual approach to migrate when compared to the Duplicator plugin. You’ll need to download the backup, upload it to the new host, and then use UpdraftPlus to restore your website.
3. All-in-One WP Migration plugin
This plugin is suitable for beginners who need a simple one-click migration solution. It has over 5 million installations and six thousand five-star reviews so we’ve added it as one of the top migration plugins in the list. The main advantage of choosing the All in one WP Migration plugin is with no technical knowledge, you can easily access the plugin and migrate your website. It limits only 512 MB of backups and migrations in its free version. Some of the key features include:
- Move theme folders, plugins, and more to different locations.
- Compatible with many hosting providers
- Capability to bypass the upload limit size
- No technical knowledge is needed to perform migration
- Supports custom uploads.
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4. Migrate Guru
This plugin is brought to you by BlogVault and stands out for its intuitive interface, migration scheduling capabilities, and restoration features.
With Migrate Guru, you can easily transfer your site to a new host, duplicate your site, and take backup with ease. Supports 5000+ web hosting providers such as wpengine, cloudways, bluehost, godaddy, hostgator, digitalocean, siteground, hostinger, kinsta, aws, etc.,
It allows you to schedule migration at your convenience time and restore to the previous version in case of any issues.
The top features of Migrate Guru include
- One-click migration feature.
- No need for additional add-ons.
- Compatible with larger site migration.
- Not overloading the site.
- Automated search and replace feature.
- Email alerts to keep you updated with the website migration status.
- Supports many website hosts.
- Not requiring any storage space.
Best WordPress Paid Migration plugins
1. Duplicator Pro
Duplicator Pro is a premium WordPress migration plugin. The plugin is officially verified by WPbeginner. Building upon the free version. the pro version offers many flexible features like larger file size support, complete wordpress site backups, automatic backup scheduling, cloud backup storage, 1-click rollback option, backup encryption, server-to-server import, custom search & replacement of old URLs, etc., It supports migration and backup of the multi-site network making it an efficient choice for complex migrations. From multisite to standalone site, and single site to multi-site network, it perfectly migrates.
It also works with a shared database. You can take your website files and database backups in a few minutes. Duplicator Pro is the best choice if you need more flexibility and control over the migration process.
Duplicator Pro’s pricing is categorized based on no. of sites and support features. They offer the yearly plan and the basic package starts at $39.60. Learn more about Duplicator Pro pricing here. https://duplicator.com/pricing/
2. Solid Backups (Formerly BackupBuddy)
Solid Backups or BackupBuddy, invented in 2010, has become one of the oldest and most popular migration plugins. This plugin has a huge fan base for its robust backup feature. It offers a one-click restoration option, complete website backup, rollback db changes, website scanning for vulnerable plugins & themes, and automatic and scheduled backup features. You can set up notifications to alert once the backup is completed. Supports backup storage in locations like Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc.,
It deploys your staging site to a live server with just a single click. It doesn’t come with a multisite feature. It’s hard for beginners to restore and migrate with this plugin.
The pricing plan is based on the count of site usage and it has a yearly price plan. The basic plan which is the single site pricing starts at $99 per year. You can explore more about the solid backup pricing feature here.
3. Migrate DB Pro
The Migrate DB Pro plugin is developed by the team Delicious Brains. Migrate DB Pro makes it easy to transfer your development or staging site to Production and vice versa in a single click. It specializes in database migration, making it ideal for developers and advanced users to access this plugin. It requires some technical knowledge to utilize the plugin.
The top features of the Migrate DB Pro plugin include:
- Easy to make a copy of your website database to another site.
- Lets you backup database before replacing it
- Provides add-on for media files, and theme & plugin files.
- Find and replace any texts in the database
- Handles complex server hosting.
The price starts from $49 for the initial basic plan and it increases upon site count. If you want the addons support(media, multisite, theme & plugins) you need to buy the Plus plan which is currently $189.
Conclusion: Effortless Website Migration with the Right Plugin by Your Side
Migrating your WordPress website can seem like a daunting task, but with the help of the right plugin, it can be a smooth and efficient process. This blog post explored a variety of free and paid migration plugins, each with its strengths and limitations.
Here’s a quick recap:
- Free Migration Plugins: Duplicator (user-friendly), UpdraftPlus (backup-focused), All-in-One WP Migration (one-click migration for beginners, limitations on file size), Migrate Guru (scheduling, rollback features).
- Paid Migration Plugins: Duplicator Pro (larger file size support, multisite compatibility), Solid Backups (robust backups, premium pricing), Migrate DB Pro (ideal for developers, specializes in database migration).
Choose the right migration plugin depending on your needs:
- Beginners: Opt for user-friendly options like Duplicator (free) or All-in-One WP Migration (free).
- Larger Websites: Consider Duplicator Pro (paid) for its larger file size support.
- Complex Migrations: Duplicator Pro (paid) or Migrate DB Pro (paid) cater to multisite or advanced database needs.
Remember, before migrating, always back up your website and consider creating a staging site for testing purposes.
By following these tips and choosing the most suitable plugin for your website, you can ensure a smooth and successful migration process, taking your website to new heights!
