WordPress Complete Manual Backup

BACK UP FILES

  1. Login to your cPanel
  2. Find the root directory of you website (normally public_html)
  3. Double click on public_html to open the folder
  4. Click on the first file/fold in the directory – hold your shift key – click on the last file/folder in that directory – all should be highlighted
  5. Right mouse click on any of the highlighted files and a menu should appear
  6. Choose Compress
  7. For windows, I choose “Zip Archive”
  8. Click Compress Files
  9. It will name the zip after the first file/fold in the directory – my files was cgi-bin.zip
  10. Rename to whatever is relevant i.e. domainname-backup-date.zip
  11. Right mouse click on file & download your computer
  12. Next find your database name by looking in your wp-config file (double-click will download the file) open with note-pad and look for DB_NAME

BACK UP DATABASE

  1. Go back to cPanel
  2. Under Databases choose phpMyAdmin
  3. On the left menu find the database that is used by your WordPress Site (DB_Name above)
  4. Click once on the name all tables should now show on the left and be highlighted
  5. Click Export from the top menu
  6. Quick – display only the minimal options
  7. SQL format
  8. Click GO

MOVE TO SECURE LOCATION

  1. All files that we download should show on the bottom bar of your browser (if they are not there, look in your download fold on your machine)
  2. Right click on one and choose open in folder
  3. Highlight and move these files to a location you will remember. It is always a good idea to keep several copies in different locations – on your hard drive, on an external hard drive that is not normally connected to your computer, and on the cloud as well

Then to move to a new domain name:

Upload the zip and extract
Create a new database, user name and assign user to database
Import database

After you import your database, go to the wp_options table and select Edit. You need to change the location of your website in this table. 

  1. Locate the words ‘siteurl’ and ‘home’. 
  2. For siteurl, under option_value, replace the old domain name with the new one. Press enter to save. 
  3. Next for home, repeat the same step. Replace the domain name with the new one and hit enter.
  1. Go to cPanel public_html > wp-config.php. Right-click and edit this file. If you’re using FTP, you need to download the file, and open it in any text editor to make the changes.
  2. Find the following lines:
  3. update the database user & password

More Info: https://blogvault.net/moving-wordpress-site-to-another-domain/