Open Migration – Unlimited Site Transfer & Backup

Open Migration copies a complete WordPress site – database, themes, plugins, uploads – into a single .zip archive, and restores that archive onto any other WordPress install.

Both the export and the import run in small batches over AJAX. Nothing is held in memory all at once and no single request runs long enough to time out, so multi-gigabyte sites work on ordinary shared hosting.

Restoring onto a brand new WordPress

You do not have to prepare the destination. Install WordPress, install this plugin, upload the archive, and the plugin works out the differences for you:

• Site URL – every reference to the old domain is rewritten to the new one, including inside PHP-serialised option values, JSON-escaped block markup, and URL-encoded links.
• Server paths – absolute paths stored by page builders and cache plugins are updated to the new document root.
• Table prefix – if the old site used wp_abc_ and the new one uses wp_, every table, option name and user meta key is converted during the restore.
• Serialised data – values are unserialised, replaced and re-serialised so string length prefixes stay correct. A naive find-and-replace corrupts these; this does not.

Migrating before you switch DNS

Most real migrations happen while the domain still points at the old host, so you work on the new server through a temporary address – site.yourhost.com, a staging subdomain, or a raw IP.

That is fine. Import onto the temporary address and the site works there straight away. Then, once you have pointed DNS and the real domain loads the new server, open the Change Domain tab and enter the real address. Every reference is rewritten in one pass.

This step cannot be automatic. WordPress only ever sees the hostname a visitor requested, so it has no way of knowing that DNS was switched – it will keep sending visitors back to the temporary address until you tell it otherwise. The Change Domain tab is also the right tool for moving from http to https, or for renaming a domain later on.

Direct site-to-site transfer

Instead of downloading and re-uploading an archive, the source site can issue a one-time token. Paste the token into the destination site and it pulls the archive directly over the WordPress REST API, then runs the same automatic conversion.

What gets exported

• The full database for this site’s table prefix
• wp-content – themes, plugins, uploads, languages and anything else you have put there

Transient caches (wp-content/cache, wp-content/upgrade) and other plugins’ backup folders are skipped, because restoring them is pointless and they are often larger than the site itself.

What is not touched

wp-config.php, WordPress core files and your database credentials are never included in the archive and never overwritten. The destination keeps its own configuration.

Who makes this

Open Migration is built and maintained by DiceCodes. It is free and open source under GPLv2, with no paid tier, no upsells and no data collection of any kind.