As you may know, I have been running my blogs for more than 10 years now using Joomla and WordPress. Recently, I was faced with a situation where I wanted to move to another hosting and it comes with the latest OS. And this latest OS apparently doesn’t support older Joomla and WordPress because it’s running the latest PHP.
So at that moment, I have some choices:
* Retire my blogs, basically just let it close. And start a new blog on the new hosting.
* Or try to migrate them to the new hosting.
I searched the internet and found the following working method to migrate older WordPress and Joomla to the latest ones.
In general, these are the steps:
1. Update the CMS to the latest version possible on the current hosting. For WordPress, it should be quite easy and automatic. But for Joomla, it could involve some manual steps and is quite difficult. Especially my Joomla was very old (note: in the end I didn’t update the Joomla).
2. Deactivate all plugins. We need to do this because the plugin could be not maintained and is not compatible with the latest PHP on new hosting.
3. Backup database. Use this command to make it auto-create the database when you import them.
mysqldump -u root -p --databases [datatabase_name] > database_name.sql4. Back up the WordPress and Joomla files.
5. Adjust your web DNS to point to the new hosting.
6. Now we work on the new hosting. Prepare it for hosting WordPress and Joomla. Basically installing the apache and its virtual hosts’ settings, required PHP modules, and MySQL.
7. WordPress:
* Extract the WordPress backup files into your web directory.
* Delete wp-admin and wp-include
* Extract the latest WordPress files into the web directory, overwriting the old WordPress files. Don’t worry it won’t overwrite your config files.
* Open your WordPress web from a browser such as www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow the instructions. This will update your database to be compatible with the latest WordPress.
* After this, you should be able to log in to WordPress and do anything required such as re-activating plugins, strengthening security, etc.
8. Joomla:
For Joomla, it’s not quite straightforward:
* On the old hosting, install a fresh installation of WordPress. You may need to install older version of WordPress according to the version of PHP installed.
* On the fresh WordPress, install this plugin: FG Joomla to WordPress.
* Follow the instruction. Basically, it will “pull up” your Joomla content (database and files) into WordPress.
* After it’s done, you basically follow the WordPress above to migrate it to the new hosting. However, do note that you may need to do some clean up of the formatting on the posts, especially if they have some pictures.
I hope this article helps. Good luck 🙂
Reference:
https://wordpress.org/support/article/updating-wordpress/
https://themeisle.com/blog/migrate-joomla-to-wordpress/