3 Problems After Moving WordPress Host and Their Solutions

Many WordPress users think a million times before shifting to a new web host, server or a new domain because of the fear of loosing their data, visitors or search rank. To some extent, their fear is genuine because a lot of problems may be caused after WordPress server migration which may eventually result into data loss, page load errors and even site rendering. In this post are three common problems which comes up after host migration and some effective ways to solve them.

Homepage opening but clicking any link gives a blank/404/error page

Problem?

Once you shift your blog, you can see your homepage and site admin area but when you click on any link on the homepage including posts, categories, tags etc, you get a blank page or a 404 not found error, or you get redirected to your hosting provider's page or any other similar problem occurs. This problem occurs when you are using pretty permalinks in your blog instead of WordPress' default (ugly) permalink structure.

Solution.

1. Open your web server via FTP or any other file manager.


2. Locate .htaccess file in the WordPress home directory. (If you don't have any such file you can skip step 2, 3 and 7).


3. Download the file and delete it from your server.


4. Now go to your WordPress dashboard and then go to "Permalinks" under the settings module.


5. Set the permalinks structure to "default" (don't worry, this is temporary) and see your posts and other pages should start appearing again.


6. Set the permalinks structure to whatever fits your blog.


7. Upload the .htaccess file again to the same directory in the web server.

This should solve your problem and the links should start opening again.

Some of the links target your old URLs when you have changed the domain

Problem?

This generally happens when you shift your WordPress blog to a new domain. Your posts will open the URLs with the old domain but the homepage opens fine with the new domain. This problem occurs if you do not change your domain in your database's  options table.

Solution.

1. Login to your WordPress database in phpMyAdmin or similar.


2. Open the wp_options (the prefix may vary) table.
   


3.  Click on "browse" from the menu.
   


4.  Edit the option_value of the option_name "siteurl" to the URL of your new site.
   


5. Go to page 2 of your options table and add the new URL similarly in the option_name "home".


6. Close phpMyAdmin.

This should fix the problem.

Content does not upload

Problem?

Uploading media does not work. Various files such as images and videos do not upload in your database. This problem occurs when your database's default upload location does not change while shifting the database. You can solve this problem easily.

Solution.

1. Go to Settings>>Media in your WordPress admin panel.


2. Fill in your upload folder and full URL path.. They should look like
   

    wp-content/uploads

   
   

    /home/yourusername/wp-content/uploads



3. Save the changes.

This can also be done by editing upload value in the wp_options table in your database if you don't have access to your dashboard due to some other migration problem. This should fix the issue.

This is all we have for you in this post. I hope this guide will help you a bit. Thanks for reading.