WPvivid Review: Migrate Your WordPress Site in Minutes

Why You Might Need to Migrate a WordPress Site

There are a handful of scenarios where you'll need to pick up your entire WordPress site and move it somewhere else. Maybe you've outgrown your current hosting provider and want to upgrade. Maybe you've been building on a staging environment and it's time to push everything live. Or perhaps you're rebranding and switching to a new domain name entirely.

Whatever the reason, site migration has a reputation for being stressful — and for good reason. Between databases, plugins, themes, and media files, there are a lot of moving pieces that need to land in exactly the right place. The good news is that tools like WPvivid have made this process dramatically simpler than it used to be.

The Migration Setup: Cloudways to GridPane

For this walkthrough, the source site is a print-on-demand business hosted on Cloudways. It's running the free Astra theme with Elementor, WooCommerce, several Brainstorm Force plugins (header/footer, starter templates), WooCommerce cart abandonment recovery, WP Forms Lite, and the Breeze caching plugin. There are eight published pages and one draft — a fully fleshed-out site with real content.

The destination is a fresh WordPress install on GridPane with nothing but the default theme and a handful of server-level plugins like Redis Object Cache and an Nginx helper. Essentially a blank slate. The goal is to take everything from the Cloudways site and land it perfectly on GridPane without breaking anything.

Step-by-Step: Migrating with WPvivid's Auto Migration

The process starts by installing the free WPvivid plugin on both your source and destination sites. You can find it right in the WordPress plugin repository — no need to purchase anything for basic migration.

Once installed on both ends, head to the destination site first. Navigate to the WPvivid settings and find the "Key" tab, then hit "Generate." This creates a unique key that links your two sites together. Copy that key, switch over to your source site, and go to WPvivid's "Auto Migration" tab. Paste the key in and hit save.

Now select what you want to transfer. For a full site migration, leave "Database + Files" selected — this grabs everything including your themes, plugins, uploads, and database content. Hit "Clone and Transfer" and let it run. In this case, the entire migration took just a couple of minutes.

Restoring on the Destination Site

Once the transfer completes, switch over to your destination site. Under the WPvivid backups section, you'll see the backup that was just sent over from the source. Click "Restore," confirm, and WPvivid will unzip all the files, reassemble the database, and apply everything to your destination WordPress install.

After the restore completes, you'll likely get logged out — that's normal since the database just changed. Log back in with your source site credentials and start checking things. All eight published pages and the one draft carried over perfectly. Every plugin that was active on Cloudways showed up active on GridPane. The homepage matched the source site pixel for pixel. Migration complete, no hitches.

What to Do If Auto Migration Fails

The auto migration feature works beautifully when you're moving between two solid hosts — like going from Cloudways to GridPane. But if you're migrating away from a poorly performing host, the live transfer process can sometimes overwhelm the server and crash your site.

WPvivid has a fallback approach for exactly this situation. Instead of using auto migration, create a full backup on the source site and download it to your local computer. Then install WPvivid on your destination site and upload the backup file manually. From there, the restore process is identical. It takes a bit longer since you're downloading and re-uploading, but it avoids putting strain on a fragile source server.

After Migration: Set Up Your Backup Schedule

Once your site is settled on its new host, the very first thing you should do is set up a regular backup schedule. WPvivid handles this too — you can configure automatic backups to run on a schedule and even send them to remote storage locations like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3.

The free version of WPvivid covers basic migrations and backups, but the pro version adds features like incremental backups and the ability to back up to multiple remote locations simultaneously. If you're managing several WordPress sites or want more granular control, the pro upgrade is worth considering — especially while the plugin is still relatively new and pricing is competitive.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.