How to Change Your Godaddy WordPress Hosting Version

If you run a WordPress blog on GoDaddy, this post is for you. It will teach you how to easily change the version of WordPress that you’re running on your site without having to worry about breaking anything.

The Problem

Often, businesses will set up a WordPress blog along with a storefront on Shopify or SquareSpace. The problem is that once you have your blog, you have to keep running a few different versions of WordPress to support all of the changes that the business wants to make to the site. When you have a team of developers working for you, this isn’t a problem. However, if you’re running a WordPress site by yourself, this can be a headache. You’ll either have to update the entire code base whenever a new version of WordPress comes out or find some way to limit the changes that you make to the site to those that can be applied to existing WordPress versions.

The Solution

Instead of finding yourself in the situation where you have to deal with a team of developers when you need help, why not find a way to do everything on your own? There are many WordPress hosting providers out there, and if you do a little bit of research, you’ll easily find a host that supports the version of WordPress that you want to use. In this case, we’re going to use the popular hosting service, Bluehost, to show you how to make this change easily and without any headaches.

Step 1: Switching To The Bluehost WordPress Host

There are many benefits to using a managed WordPress host. One of the primary reasons is the lack of worry that you have about breaking your site when upgrading WordPress versions. With a managed host, updating WordPress is as simple as changing a couple of lines of code in your site’s configuration file. This way, when you update WordPress on your site, you won’t have to worry about any of the functionality that you have being broken by the update.

Step 2: Activating The Automatic Updates

The best thing about using a managed WordPress host is that they’ll take care of updating WordPress for you. No more needing to check in with your web host every few months to make sure that the latest version of WordPress is up to date. With automatic updates, maintaining a WordPress blog will be as easy as installing the software and changing a couple of lines of code.

Step 3: Getting Custom Domain And Site Key

Even though you’re using Bluehost, you still need a way to identify your site. This is where getting a custom domain and site key comes in. Often times, people will use their existing domain with a parked page as a catch-all for any type of website that they have. While this works, it’s not the most ideal solution if you’re looking for branding and SEO. Instead, you should create an additional subdomain for your specific website like blog.example.com where example is your custom domain name. To find the site key for your new blog, you can click here and enter your custom domain to see your site key.

Step 4: Renaming Your Site’s Files And Folders

Another thing that you’ll need to do to fully integrate your new WordPress installation into your site is to rename the files and folders on your server. This is a manual process and can be a pain to do by yourself, especially if you have a lot of files in your site. Instead, it’s better to use a tool like Fresh WordPress Migrator to do all of the file renaming for you. This tool will take care of all of the renaming for you so all of your content will be kept intact.

Step 5: Testing The New WordPress Version

Once you’ve changed all of the files on your server to reflect the new WordPress version, it’s time to test your work. Ideally, you should run through this process a few times to ensure that everything is working correctly before going live with the new WordPress version.

Step 6: Migrate Your Existing Blog To The New WordPress Version

Now that you have a fully integrated and operational WordPress blog on your site, it’s time to take care of the last step and move your existing content over to the new version. There are a few different methods for doing this, but one of the simplest is to use an online tool like WordPress Migrate. With this tool, all of the content that you have on your old WordPress site will be automatically updated on your new site. Just remember to take your time during this step and make sure that everything is transferred over correctly.

With these easy-to-follow instructions, you’ll be able to change the hosting version of your WordPress site without any headaches. Using a managed WordPress host will ensure that all of the content and functionality on your site will be preserved when you update WordPress. This way, you’ll never have to worry about running out of storage on your server or breaking anything when you update the software.