How To Transfer an Existing Website to WA Hosting & Rebuild Your Website at the Same Time

byNikkiLanta

337 followers

Updated 7 years ago

If you have an existing website being hosted outside of WA, it makes sense to transfer it over to WA to save yourself an unnecessary expense. This is what I decided to do with my Virtual Assistant website, but I have to admit moving websites around kind of scares me and I was clueless about how to do it. So, if you're in the same boat, this post should hopefully be helpful to you.

I also wanted to redesign my website, and I decided to completely rebuild it by setting up a siterubix site with the same domain name. So, I called the siterubix site mydomainname.siterubix.com. This means that I can take my time rebuilding my site without it being down while I'm doing it. Once I'm happy with the new site, I can move the siterubix one over to my domain name.

So, how do you transfer an existing website over to WA hosting and cancel your old hosting, saving yourself a fair amount of money?

Here is a basic summary of the process and there is a more in-depth account of it below:

1. Email WA Support

2. Send them the info they request

3. They set up a temporary siterubix site for your domain

4. Log into your Domain Registrar account and change the nameservers to WA

5. Add your domain name to WA

6. Move the temporary siterubix site to your domain.

7. Cancel your old hosting account.

Sounds pretty straight forward right? Well, it kind of was but it wasn't actually as easy as I thought it was going to be. So, if you need a bit more guidance, here's a more detailed explanation of the whole process.

The first thing I did was send an email to support to say I would like to transfer my website from Siteground to WA and asked them how to do this, what info they needed etc.

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/websites/support/

I was really impressed to get a reply from them within just a few minutes saying:

To transfer your website to Wealthy Affiliate servers all they need is your website URL, FTP details, wp-admin log in details, and a backup link.

If you're like me, you might be asking yourself what the hek is FTP and how do I find my log in details?!

So, I asked my friend google for some help and found out they are available in your User Area under My Accounts at the Information & Settings page. Your main FTP login details are the same as your cPanel username and password.

I then checked what my wp log in details are and now just had to deal with the backup link.

To create a full cPanel backup of your account, press the Download a Full Website Backup button.

It says they will email you when it's ready, but they didn't. I thought it was taking a long time, so went back to check on it a couple of hours later and, after clicking on, 'Download a full website back up' again, I could see the link ready for downloading.

I went into my downloads folder on my laptop and clicked on it, and was then prompted to install Express Zip, which installed very quickly.

Then, it was over to my Dropbox account to copy the zipped doc over. This took over 20 minutes.

Once that was done, I copied the link and emailed support all of the info.

Amazingly, I sent them all the correct info and they replied, again really quickly, to say they had transferred the content of my website to a temporary SiteRubix site. They asked me to check that it had all transferred correctly, which it had, and then I could point my domain to WA, i.e. change the nameservers.

I logged into my domain provider, which is with Godaddy and under the DNS Management page, I clicked on 'Change' under the Nameservers section. I copied and pasted the WA nameserver names and saved it.

I then went into the Site Manager area on WA to move the temporary siterubix site over to my domain. This is when I started to panic because I couldn't see my domain in the list of my WA sites. I thought I must have done something wrong!

I sent a message to support who told me I needed to add my domain name. To do this, you need to go to Site Domains. Scroll down to Other Domains and simply type in your domain name and add it. You should now see your domain name when you click on 'Move' under the temporary siterubix site.

Phew, that was a relief!! I had done it - I had successfully transferred my website over to WA hosting.

The next, and final stage was to log into my Siteground account and go to the billing area to cancel my account. This basically involved unticking the 'Automatic Renewal' box.

Now I just need to finish rebuilding my site and move it over to my domain!