Title: Moving large website
Last modified: August 24, 2016

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# Moving large website

 *  [denisgomesfranco](https://wordpress.org/support/users/denisgomesfranco/)
 * (@denisgomesfranco)
 * [11 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/moving-large-website/)
 * Hi,
 * I need to move a large installation of WordPress and would like some advice.
 * By ‘large’ I mean lots of images (around 5 gigabytes of files) and not so much
   posts and pages, so i believe the exported XML file won’t be very big and can
   fit the upload limit of the new host without any problems.
 * When moving websites using the XML file, WordPress can automatically download
   the attached images used in posts, so I don’t need to manually download the files
   via FTP and then reupload it to the new server.
 * However, what would happen with such a large media library? Am I at risk of getting
   a timeout during import/download?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

 *  Moderator [James Huff](https://wordpress.org/support/users/macmanx/)
 * (@macmanx)
 * [11 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/moving-large-website/#post-6003041)
 * > Am I at risk of getting a timeout during import/download?
 * Possibly, it really depends on the configuration of both servers.
 * In general, with large moves, we typically recommend backing up the database 
   and restoring it at the destination, then moving the files via something like
   SFTP or SCP.
 * SFTP and SCP are designed for moving files, so they won’t timeout like a PHP 
   process could.
 * [https://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress](https://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress)
 *  [jon](https://wordpress.org/support/users/adiant/)
 * (@adiant)
 * [11 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/moving-large-website/#post-6003073)
 * I have moved sites as large as 4.2GB on several occasions. The fastest and most
   reliable method has involved going one step farther than James, as I’ve had access
   to tar.gz format compression and decompression on both the source and destination
   servers.
 * My point is that I would much prefer to move a dozen or so large .tar.gz compressed
   files than I would tens of thousands of smaller files.
 * To speed things up, I try and transfer directly across the Internet between the
   two web servers, rather than download to my own PC and upload to the new server,
   because home Internet speeds, especially upload, are so slow.
 * Finally, last time I checked, Windows still has a bug with the built-in .zip 
   decompression on files bigger than 4GB, I think it is. It will give you some 
   zero length files. Which is why I stick to GZip.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

The topic ‘Moving large website’ is closed to new replies.

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 2 replies
 * 3 participants
 * Last reply from: [jon](https://wordpress.org/support/users/adiant/)
 * Last activity: [11 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/moving-large-website/#post-6003073)
 * Status: not resolved

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