How to Migrate a WordPress Site to Hostinger (Free Migration or DIY)

This post explains how to migrate a WordPress site to Hostinger. If your current host has become slow, expensive at renewal, or hard to deal with, moving is less work than it sounds: a WordPress site is just a folder of files plus a database, and both can be copied to a new server while the old one keeps running.

Screenshot: the website migration step in Hostinger’s hPanel.

There are two ways to do it. Hostinger offers a free migration where its team moves the site for you, or you can do it yourself with a migration plugin in about half an hour. In this guide I cover both, then show how to test the copy before switching DNS so visitors never see a broken site.

Highlights:

• Free migration by Hostinger, or a DIY move with a free plugin.
• Test the copy on a temporary address before anyone sees it.
• No downtime: the old host keeps serving visitors until DNS switches.
• A post-migration checklist for SSL, email, caching and backups.

Before You Start

A few minutes of preparation prevents most migration problems:

1. Make a full backup on your current host (files and database) and download it to your computer. Whatever happens during the move, you can always go back.
2. Check your site’s size. In your current host’s file manager or with a plugin, note the total size of wp-content and the database. Most small sites are under 1GB; very large media libraries affect which method you choose.
3. Clean up first. Delete unused plugins and themes, spam comments and old post revisions. Less data means a faster, safer move.
4. Write down your DNS records. Open your domain’s DNS settings and save a copy of every record, especially MX, SPF, DKIM and TXT records for email and domain verifications. You will need them if you change nameservers.
5. Know where your email lives. If your email mailboxes are hosted by your current web host, they won’t move with the website. See what to do about email below before switching DNS.
6. Don’t cancel the old hosting yet. Keep it running until the new site has worked for at least a few days.

Choose a Hostinger Plan

For a typical blog or small business site, shared hosting is enough. At the time of writing, Hostinger’s Premium plan costs $2.49/month for up to 3 websites with 20 GB of SSD storage, and Unlimited costs $3.49/month with unlimited websites, 50 GB NVMe storage, daily backups and a CDN. Both prices need a 48-month prepayment (about $120 and $168 at checkout) and renew at $10.99/month and $16.99/month, so compare the full-term cost. Plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

If your site gets a lot of traffic or runs WooCommerce with many products, choose Unlimited or Cloud Startup ($7.99/month, 100 GB NVMe, renewing at $25.99/month) instead of the cheapest tier. For a wider comparison, see our list of cheap web hosting for your first website, or Hostinger vs SiteGround if you’re coming from SiteGround.

To see what each plan will really cost over the years you plan to keep the site, try our web hosting cost calculator.

See Hostinger hosting plans

How to Buy a Plan and Get the Best Price

1. Open Hostinger’s website and choose your plan. Cloud and VPS plans are under the Hosting menu.

   

2. Choose the plan period. Longer periods are cheaper per month, and the 4-year term is the lowest price. The cart shows the renewal price and date, and whether a free domain and bonus months are included. If you have a coupon code, enter it here and click Apply.

   

   Prices in this screenshot are from an earlier checkout and have changed since; the layout is what matters.

3. Create an account with an email address and password, or sign in with Google.

   

4. Enter your billing details and pay, then verify your email address from the message Hostinger sends you.

   

Tips for the best price:

• Hostinger’s lowest prices are usually during Black Friday (roughly mid-November to mid-December), plus a few month-long sales during the year, mostly on 4-year shared plans.
• The 4-year term is around 15% cheaper per month than the 1-year term.
• Coupon codes change and are often already built into the displayed price, so check the cart total before and after applying one.
• Email addresses from some providers (for example qq.com and 163.com) may be rejected when you register; use another mailbox, such as Gmail.
• Prices and specs change from time to time. Read the cart before you pay.

Method 1: Free Migration by Hostinger

Hostinger migrates WordPress sites for free on its hosting plans. You submit a request, and its team copies the site to your new account. This is the easiest option if you don’t want to touch files or databases.

1. On the Hostinger home page, click Continue. If you skipped the wizard, open Websites in hPanel and look for Migrate website.

   

2. The next two questions are optional; answer them or skip. Then choose Migrate a website.

   

3. Choose the plan period and enter a coupon code if you have one.

   

4. Enter the URL of the website you want to migrate.

   

5. Enter the WordPress admin login (username and password) of the existing site. Hostinger says it only uses them to migrate the site. Create a temporary admin account for this and delete it afterwards.

   

6. After Hostinger validates the login, you reach a confirmation page where you can choose where your website is located. Click Submit Request.

   

7. The Migrations page shows the ongoing jobs, and you’ll receive an email when the migration starts and another when it finishes or fails.

   

   

When it succeeds, your content, media, plugins and settings are on your Hostinger account. Hostinger migrates through the All-in-One WP Migration plugin behind the scenes, so very large sites (I’ve seen about 20 GB fail) can run into the execution time limit; use the DIY method below for those.

The migration team copies the site but does not change your DNS. That part is up to you, which is good: you get to test the new copy first. Continue with Test the site before switching DNS.

Good to know: the free migration is for Web, Cloud and Agency plans (not VPS), and the credential method works for self-hosted WordPress and cPanel sites. You can have up to five active requests at a time. Cron jobs, DNS records, custom SSL settings, FTP accounts and email are not migrated, so set those up yourself. Hostinger recommends turning off 2FA and CAPTCHA on the old site’s login while the migration runs. See Hostinger’s official migration guide for the current rules.

Method 2: Migrate It Yourself with a Plugin

Doing it yourself takes about 30 minutes for a small site and gives you full control over the timing. I’ll use All-in-One WP Migration, one of the most popular free migration plugins, because it packs files and database into one file and handles the URL replacements for you.

Step 1: Create an empty WordPress site on Hostinger

1. In hPanel, add your domain as a new website and choose WordPress. Follow the wizard; the admin details you choose here are temporary, because the import will replace them. Our WordPress installation guide walks through the wizard.
2. Don’t point the domain to Hostinger yet. Open the new site through Hostinger’s temporary domain or preview link instead.

Step 2: Export the old site

1. On your old site, go to Plugins > Add New, install and activate All-in-One WP Migration.
2. Open All-in-One WP Migration > Export, choose Export to > File, and download the .wpress file.

If the export is very large, use the plugin’s advanced options to exclude spam comments, post revisions or the media library, and copy wp-content/uploads separately over FTP.

Step 3: Import on Hostinger

1. Log in to the new WordPress site (through the temporary domain), install and activate the same plugin.
2. Open All-in-One WP Migration > Import, drag in the .wpress file and confirm that it overwrites the site.
3. When the import finishes, open Settings > Permalinks and click Save Changes twice. This rebuilds the rewrite rules so your post URLs work.
4. Log in again with your old site’s admin username and password, because the import replaced the users.

If the upload is too big: the free version of the plugin is limited by the server’s upload size. If the file exceeds it, either raise the PHP upload limits in hPanel (Advanced > PHP Configuration), use the Hostinger free migration instead, or use a plugin with no import limit such as Duplicator or Migrate Guru.

Alternative without plugins: copy the site’s files over FTP/SFTP into public_html, export the database from phpMyAdmin on the old host, import it into a new database on Hostinger, and update DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD and DB_HOST in wp-config.php. This is the most reliable method for very large sites but has more room for mistakes.

Test the Site Before Switching DNS

At this point the site exists twice: on the old host (still serving visitors) and on Hostinger. Check the new copy carefully:

• Open it through Hostinger’s temporary domain, or edit your computer’s hosts file to point your domain at the Hostinger server’s IP address, so only your computer sees the new host.
• Click through the home page, several posts, pages and categories. Watch for 404 errors (fix with Settings > Permalinks > Save) and missing images.
• Log in to wp-admin, then try publishing a draft and uploading an image.
• Test forms, search, and checkout if you run a shop. Contact forms that send email may need an SMTP plugin on the new host.
• Check Tools > Site Health for PHP version or missing-module warnings. Set the PHP version in hPanel to the one your old host used, or a newer one your theme and plugins support.

If you use the hosts-file method, remember to remove the line afterwards.

Switch DNS Without Downtime

Once the new site passes testing:

1. A day before, lower the TTL of your domain’s DNS records to 300 seconds (5 minutes), so the switch takes effect quickly.

2. Freeze content on the old site. New comments, orders or posts made on the old host after the copy won’t move over. For a shop, put the old site in maintenance mode during the switch, or migrate again right before it.

3. Point the domain to Hostinger. Open your domain registrar’s panel. If you’re coming from SiteGround, the nameservers are ns1.siteground.net and ns2.siteground.net; replace them with Hostinger’s:

   ns1.dns-parking.com
   ns2.dns-parking.com

   The other method is to keep your current DNS provider and change the A record for @ and www to the server IP shown in hPanel. In that case Hostinger’s CDN isn’t enabled. See Hostinger’s guide to pointing a domain. DNS changes take from a few minutes up to 24 hours to propagate.

4. Recreate your other DNS records first if you change nameservers. MX, SPF, DKIM and verification records don’t move automatically; add them in Hostinger’s DNS editor before switching, or your email will stop working.

5. Keep the old host running for a few days. Visitors whose DNS hasn’t updated yet still reach a working site.

What About Email?

This is the part of a migration that most often goes wrong. It depends on where your mailboxes are today:

• Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoho or another email service: nothing to move. Just make sure the MX, SPF and DKIM records exist in whichever DNS you use after the switch.
• Mailboxes on your old web host: those mailboxes stop receiving mail when your MX records change. Create the same addresses in Hostinger’s email section first, import the old messages with Hostinger’s built-in Email Import tool, then switch the MX records. The full steps are in how to migrate business email to Hostinger.

For a deeper look at the options, see our guide to setting up a professional email address with your own domain.

After the Move: Checklist

• SSL: open the site over https:// and check for the padlock. Hostinger activates a free certificate once the domain points to its servers; if it shows as pending, wait until the DNS change finishes.
• Force HTTPS in hPanel, and fix any “mixed content” warnings with a search-and-replace of http://yourdomain.com to https://yourdomain.com.
• Caching: Hostinger runs LiteSpeed servers. Replace other caching plugins (WP Rocket, SiteGround’s Speed Optimizer and so on) with LiteSpeed Cache, never two at once. See how to speed up WordPress on Hostinger.
• Backups: confirm automatic backups are running on the new plan, and make your own first backup of the migrated site.
• Cron jobs and scheduled tasks: recreate any server-level cron jobs from the old host.
• Search Console: check for crawl errors in the first week. Your URLs haven’t changed, so rankings shouldn’t be affected.
• Cancel the old hosting only after a few days without problems, and download a final backup before you do.

Troubleshooting

• The site shows a Hostinger placeholder: DNS hasn’t switched yet, or the files are in the wrong folder. Check that WordPress is inside public_html of the right domain.
• “Error establishing a database connection”: the database details in wp-config.php don’t match the database on Hostinger (a common problem with manual migrations).
• Posts return 404 but the home page works: re-save Settings > Permalinks.
• Images are missing: the uploads folder didn’t copy completely, or image URLs still point to an old temporary address. Run a search-and-replace with a plugin such as Better Search Replace.
• Email stopped arriving: the MX records weren’t recreated in the new DNS zone. Add them from the copy you saved before the move.

Is Hostinger a Good Place to Move WordPress?

What works well: the free migration means you don’t have to do any technical work, the LiteSpeed servers and cache plugin are well suited to WordPress, and the entry plans are among the cheapest for a site of this kind. Hostinger is also one of the hosts recommended on WordPress.org.

What to watch out for: the lowest prices require a long prepayment and increase at renewal, so compare the full-term cost with what you pay now. Support is chat-based, and user reviews of response times are mixed. Very large sites and busy WooCommerce stores need a higher plan than the cheapest one.

If you’re moving a static site rather than WordPress, see our guide to moving a static site to Hostinger.

See Hostinger hosting plans

Final Thoughts:

Migrating a WordPress site is mostly about order: back up, copy, test on a temporary address, then switch DNS while the old host keeps running. If you’d rather not touch any of it, Hostinger’s free migration does the copying for you; if you want control over timing, a plugin gets it done in half an hour. Either way, plan for email and DNS records before the switch, and don’t cancel your old hosting until the new site has run smoothly for a few days.