As far as I know, I’ve never gotten editing a hosts file to work. That’s a bummer, because sometimes you need to preview a site you’ve just migrated to new hosting, without pointing the DNS over and dealing with the horrors (wonders?) of DNS propagation. hosts is supposed to make that easy, but—at least in my experience as a Windows peasant—it’s super-hard to work with and doesn’t perform as advertised.

If you’ve ever migrated a WordPress site to new hosting, you know that one of the many ways the process can turn confusing is DNS caching by your internet service provider (ISP). It looks as follows:

There are lots of ways to migrate a WordPress site. Lots of plugins can do it. You can do it over simple (S)FTP. But the quickest way I know of is via rsync and WP-CLI. But that does come with an important proviso: you need to have access to a shell (via a simple local terminal or SSH) to both ends of the migration. And that’s often harder to do than the plugin or SFTP route. But if you’ve got that, this way is a great deal faster.

As its GitHub documentation notes, the single-file PHP script searchreplacedb2 is “not terribly pretty, but it’s portable and it solves an important problem that comes up whenever WordPress sites get renamed.”

Over this past month, I’ve needed to migrate quite a few WordPress sites from one host to another. I can say with confidence: it’s still not my favorite process. There’s nothing that should be complex about it, but somehow there are enough moving parts that it’s never simple, and you feel on edge throughout. If you’ve ever put together a chair from Ikea, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

We’ve written at length about our love for All-in-One WP Migration, a beautifully simple and easy-to-use tool for WordPress site migration. The plugin is under active development by ServMask, which recently became an official Friend of WPShout (you can see them in our sidebar!), and we stay in touch with them as they develop new products.

WordPress site migrations are not easy. In fact, without additional tools, “migrate a site to another URL” is probably one of the most technical jobs that a WordPress site administrator might commonly perform.