Sometimes you have to move your entire website — hosts change, fees go up, and occasionally it becomes prudent for any business or individual to seek greener digital pastures.

You can opt to bring in an outside team to help with your migration, especially if you aren’t particularly tech-savvy (or you just don’t have the time). That can come with its own challenges, though — onboarding outsourced developers can often take more time and energy than it’s worth.

However, there are plenty of WordPress migration plugins that are user-friendly, easy to install, and will handle all of the tedious minutiae of site migration without burning out your budget or your hard-earned SEO efforts. It’d be horrible to gain all the benefits of the new site and lose all of the backlinks and authority that keep your business regularly ranking in Google.

Check out these plugins for migrations, cloning, backups, and syncing your website.

1. All-in-One WP Migration

The aptly named “All-in-One WP Migration” plugin for WordPress is easily one of the most comprehensive out there. First of all, it works with Windows, MacOS, and Linux, making it relatively platform agnostic. Second, it comes with a truly massive list of host providers it’s designed to help migrate from (and to) that also includes some of the largest, like Network Solutions, GoDaddy, A2 Hosting, and iPage.

All-in-One WP Migration plugin for WordPress is completely free, open-source software and is tough to beat. It’s frequently updated, has a robust community for support (2+ million installations at the time of this writing), and doesn’t have upload or size restrictions. Combine that with a compatibility with all major cloud storage sites — including Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and dozens of smaller services — and you’ve got an all-in-one migration plugin to fulfill most of your needs.

2. Duplicator Pro

Created by Snapcreek, Duplicator Pro is a hugely popular WordPress migration plugin with millions of downloads. You’ll find it at the top of many developers’ lists because of a huge host of features, including cloning, migration, and scheduled backups to a local server or to the cloud service of your choice.

Duplicator’s free version comes with quick migration between hosts without the need to shut down the site at any point. You can manually back up the site to one of your servers whenever you need, either the entire site or just the portions you deem necessary.

Duplicator Pro comes with scheduled backups, saving you from another task you now don’t have to worry about or slot into your calendar. It also allows for cPanel integration, notification options, and backup to cloud storage, along with a few other helpful perks.

Duplicator Pro comes in multiple different flavors and prices. Personal runs you around $59 and covers a year of support and updates, multisite basic functionality, and a license for three different sites. Freelancer is $79 and jumps up to licenses for 15 sites and power tools. The Business version is $129 and ups the ante with unlimited site licenses. For $359, you get the Gold edition, which includes all of the benefits of the Business version plus support and software updates for the lifetime of the product.

3. Migrate and Backup WordPress

WPvivid Backup Plugin, also called Migrate and Backup WordPress, comes with both a free and a paid version. The free version handles migrations, restores, and backups. The Pro version basically increases the granularity of control, allowing you to manage rollbacks of individual components like plugins and themes, create a developer environment, back up/migrate with remote storage, and back up multiple sites at once.

WPvivid’s plugin is also fully compatible and compliant with GDPR, so if you’re a site admin in Europe — or frequently deal with European websites or customers — this WordPress migration plugin is ideal. As with many of the other plugins, WPvivid supports cloud storage backups and migration from all major cloud services.

4. WP Migrate DB

Looking to migrate your entire database? In the case of an active dev environment, migration can be tricky. Luckily, the WP Migrate Database plugin smooths the process. The free version provides all of the necessary tools for database migration, including unserializing and serializing data, MySQL integration, and replacing all file paths and URLs.
The pro version builds on those features, offering options like pulling or pushing databases in either direction (right from the command line), library sync, multisite functionality, selective table migration, and email support directly from a WP Migrate DB Pro developer whenever you have a question.

5. WP Engine Automated Migration

WP Engine Automated Migration is a WordPress migration plugin designed to be used by webmasters of all different stripes. Site owners enjoy the ease of migration and the money saved not having to export the migration work to a different team. Developers will save time automating processes they would have done themselves, and SEO specialists can take comfort knowing that their entire link structure won’t be demolished during the migration.

Comprehensive walkthroughs detail every step of the migration process with WP Engine Automated Migration, complete with videos and simple tutorials — from creating the new site environment to SFTP credential generation, DNS updates, and SSL certification to maintain your security encryption for users.

6. Migrate Guru

Migrate Guru is a WordPress migration plugin that can help move your website quickly and safely, including large 200GB+ sites. It claims to move 1GB sites in around a half an hour, which you can then extrapolate to figure out how long a site of your size will take (roughly).