GoDaddy to WordPress Migration

Why should you move GoDaddy to WordPress? 

Greater customization

WordPress opens up a world of unlimited customization through its rich ecosystem of 59,000+ plugins and 11,000+ themes. Unlike GoDaddy’s limited 100+ basic templates and integrations, WordPress empowers you to fine-tune every aspect of your website – from appearance and layout to specialized features. You can craft a distinctive website that truly reflects your brand identity and business requirements. With access to thousands of themes and plugins, you’re not confined to pre-made templates but can build a unique digital presence that stands out in your industry. While GoDaddy restricts you to basic customization options, WordPress lets you modify everything from color schemes to custom CSS and PHP code.

SEO optimization

WordPress comes equipped with powerful built-in SEO tools and can be further enhanced through specialized plugins. You can easily customize meta titles, descriptions, create SEO-friendly URLs, optimize images, and manage many other SEO elements – areas where GoDaddy falls short. For instance, WordPress allows you to implement structured data markup, create custom XML sitemaps, and optimize page loading speed – crucial factors that can significantly improve your search engine rankings and visibility. With WordPress’s average page load time of 1.7-2.4 seconds compared to GoDaddy’s 2.5-3.5 seconds, your site will perform better in search rankings.

Larger community and support

One of WordPress’s standout strengths is its massive community of 1.5 million+ active developers and users across 50,000+ WordPress-specific forums. When challenges arise, you can easily tap into this vast knowledge base through forums, tutorials, and expert advice, with an average response time of 1-24 hours. In contrast, GoDaddy’s support is limited to customer service with response times of 24-48 hours and a small community forum of fewer than 10,000 users. The WordPress community is known for its collaborative spirit, with developers constantly creating new solutions and sharing insights across 500+ annual WordCamps in 65 countries and 2,000+ worldwide meetup groups. This means you’re never alone in your website journey – there’s always someone who has faced similar challenges and can offer guidance.

Advanced features

WordPress’s plugin architecture makes it incredibly versatile. Whether you need to add an e-commerce platform, membership system, learning management system, or complex booking features, there’s likely a plugin that can help among the 59,000+ available options. The platform’s flexibility allows you to start small and progressively add sophisticated functionality as your business grows, without needing to switch platforms or rebuild your site from scratch. Unlike GoDaddy’s fixed server configurations, WordPress offers unlimited bandwidth potential and storage capabilities.

Scalability

As your business expands, WordPress grows with you. The platform can handle substantial traffic increases and complex functionality requirements that might overwhelm GoDaddy’s basic plans. Whether you’re scaling from hundreds to millions of visitors, or from a simple blog to a complex e-commerce site, WordPress provides the infrastructure and flexibility to support your growth. This is evidenced by WordPress powering 43.2% of all websites on the internet, compared to GoDaddy’s less than 1% market share.

Migration considerations

While the prospect of migrating from GoDaddy to WordPress might seem daunting, the long-term benefits often outweigh the initial challenges. Professional migration services can help ensure a smooth transition, preserving your content, SEO rankings, and design elements. This investment in migration can pay off through increased functionality and future scalability. With WordPress’s free software and flexible hosting options ranging from $3-$25/month, you often end up with better value compared to GoDaddy’s fixed plans ranging from $6.99 to $16.99/month.

Learning curve

Though WordPress might initially appear more complex than GoDaddy’s user-friendly interface, modern WordPress page builders have significantly simplified the website creation process. With a bit of time invested in learning the basics, you’ll gain access to far more powerful tools and capabilities that can take your website to the next level. The investment in learning WordPress is justified by its comprehensive features, including 100% customizable SEO elements, advanced plugin options, full control over robots.txt, custom XML sitemaps, and robust schema markup support – features that GoDaddy’s basic platform simply cannot match.

How to Perform GoDaddy to WordPress Migration with LitExtension?

If you have a running GoDaddy website that contains thousands of content and images, manually transferring all that amount of data to another website builder like WordPress can be overwhelming.

Instead, you should opt for a better migration method, such as hiring a specialist like LitExtension. With over 10 years of experience & 300,000 successful migrations, we can help you migrate your website from GoDaddy to WordPress seamlessly, accurately, and securely.

With our All-in-One migration package, you can transfer most of the data, such as products, customers, etc., from GoDaddy to WordPress instead of just transferring some contents through manual migration.

If you want to know more about our All-in-One migration service, you can check out the video below.

Next, we will show you detailed steps to transfer GoDaddy to WordPress with our All-in-One service.

Step 1: You schedule a meeting with LitExtension

To begin with, fill out the form to schedule a free one-on-one meeting with us over Google Meet. For more convenience, please schedule your meeting at least two hours in advance and email us your issues beforehand.

Step 2: You receive a tailored technical consultant

During the virtual meeting, our migration experts will first listen to your specific expectations and requests. Then, we will provide you with technical consultation regarding the size and complexity of your GoDaddy website’s database.

Once we have a clear understanding of your migration needs, our specialist will present a proposal outlining the necessary steps, cost estimates, and other relevant details.

Step 3: LitExtension configures migration

Then, based on our mutual agreement from the meeting, our migration experts will proceed with configuring your migration from GoDaddy to WordPress.

If you have any further customizations or special requirements, don’t hesitate to let us know in the Customization Requirements box, and our sales specialist will contact you for a price estimate.

Step 4: Our migration experts run a free demo migration

In the next stage, LitExtension experts will perform a free demo migration with a small set of data, including product, customer, and order information. This will provide you with a clearer grasp of the migration process and its effectiveness.

*Please note that if your total entities are under 2000, the demo migration will be skipped unless you request us to perform one.

Once the demo migration is finished, we will inform you so that you can assess its results. If you have any comments regarding the demo migration results, feel free to discuss them with our migration specialists. Otherwise, we will proceed to the full migration.

Step 5: We perform full GoDaddy to WordPress migration

Then, we will perform the complete WordPress migration process. At this stage, the migration will run smoothly and securely on our servers without requiring your PC to stay on. Your existing GoDaddy website will continue to operate normally during the migration, ensuring no disruption to your business.

While the migration is in progress, our Smart Controller tool will continuously monitor it. This tool will alert us to any issues, allowing us to fix them as soon as possible.

Step 6: We check full GoDaddy to WordPress migration results

After the migration is complete, your Personal Assistant (PA) will inspect both the front and back ends of your WordPress website to confirm everything has been transferred without any error.

Once finished, our PA will inform you of the migration results. Please check it thoroughly, and feel free to ask your PA if you have any questions or concerns.

Step 7: You receive post-migration support

With our All-In-One package, you will get free post-migration services. This includes:

• Recent Data Migration: We will transfer all your new orders and customers to your WordPress website.
• Re-Migration: If the first migration does not meet your expectations, you can request our specialist to do a re-migration.
• Smart Update: We will simultaneously import your latest and previously changed data into your WordPress site.

The most awesome part is that these post-migration services are free as long as the number of migration entities is less than 10% of the first migration. Additionally, you can access these services at your fingertips for 6 months after the Full Migration.

If the amount of data is more than 10%, you will have to pay an additional fee. The cost for these services varies depending on the entities you have.

How to Perform GoDaddy to WordPress Migration Manually?

If you don’t want to hire an expert for any reason, you can still manually migrate GoDaddy to WordPress.

Step 1: Back up your GoDaddy website

1. Back up your content

Before starting to move GoDaddy website builder site to WordPress, you should back up all content on your website first. There are several methods for you to back up your GoDaddy site content.

Firstly, if you only have some pages of content and images, you can back up your content simply by copying the text into Word files and saving your images to your computer as well. To organize your files better, you should create separate files for each website page.

Secondly, you can quickly back up your content by visiting each page on your website and saving each one as a file. Press “CTRL+S” (or “Command+S” for Mac) to open the save dialog box. Next, choose “Webpage, Complete” in the Save as type field.

Another option is to use a free tool called HTTrack to save all pages of your GoDaddy website to your computer.

Once you have installed this tool, open it, fill in the required information, and click “Next.”

Next, fill in your website’s URL and click the button “Next.”

Although this tool is useful, there is one drawback that you should be aware of. Since the GoDaddy website and its themes store their database on different CDN servers, there might be some errors during the process of saving your images.

So, remember to double-check all your data after the saving progress is completed to ensure that there is no issue.

2. Back up your link structure

The next important step is backing up your link structure. If you don’t save your URLs, your customers will not be able to find your website with the old links, and this will badly affect your webpage. Backing up your old URLs will help you redirect your customers to your new WordPress site.

You will need to save all of the URLs on your website into a list in order to back up your link structure. If the number of your website URLs is few, you can simply copy and paste them into a file on your computer.

Or, you can use a free online tool on the Chrome store, such as Klipper, to extract all URLs of your website.

Once you have added it to your Chrome extension, open it on your website homepage and follow the instructions.

Step 2: Set up a new WordPress site

After backing up all data and URLs from your GoDaddy website, let’s create a WordPress website.

1. Install WordPress

You can go to WordPress.org to download and use WordPress for free. If you need more detailed instruction, please read here.

2. Choosing a Hosting service

Then, you have to choose a hosting service for your website since WordPress is a self-hosted website builder.

If you have already registered for hosting with GoDaddy’s hosting service, you can use it for your new WordPress website. (Remember to deactivate your GoDaddy website builder service before connecting your new WordPress store to GoDaddy’s hosting service.)

Step 3: Point your domain name to new WordPress hosting service

This step is for users who registered a domain name with GoDaddy and want to use it with a new WordPress hosting service. If you don’t register a domain name with GoDaddy, you can skip this step.

You can point your domain to a new hosting service simply by changing its nameservers to those of the hosting company you registered with before. If you need more detailed information, please follow the instructions here.

Step 4: Import all your GoDaddy website content into WordPress

Now, it’s time to import all content from your GoDaddy website into your new WordPress site.

In the WordPress dashboard, move to the “Pages” section and choose “Add new” to import your pages to your new website.

After uploading your content completely, double-check it and click the “Publish” button to make your page live on the website.

To import your blog posts, move to the “Posts” section and do the uploading pages.

Step 5: Setup redirects

Then, you can start setting up redirects. By doing so, search engines will guide your customers to your new website when they use the old URLs to search for your pages.

You can easily do this by installing redirect plugins to your WordPress website.

These plugins are easy to use. You just need to fill in your old URLs and the new URLs you want to redirect.

For example, we use 301 Redirects – Easy Redirect Manager by Webfactory LTD:

Click the button “Save” to save the redirect.

Step 6: Check the result, customize, and go live with your WordPress website

After moving GoDaddy to WordPress completely, you should thoroughly recheck all the content on your new website.

Once the initial setup is complete, you can personalize your WordPress site. You can choose a new theme from a vast array of themes that suit your brand’s aesthetic and functionality needs.

Additionally, you can enhance your site’s capabilities by installing various plugins, which can add features like SEO optimization, social media integration, e-commerce functionality, contact forms, and more.

After customizing your website to your satisfaction, you can make it live, allowing your customers to access and interact with your content seamlessly.

How to Perform GoDaddy to WordPress Migration with LitExtension?

If you have a running GoDaddy website that contains thousands of content and images, manually transferring all that amount of data to another website builder like WordPress can be overwhelming.

Instead, you should opt for a better migration method, such as hiring a specialist like LitExtension. With over 10 years of experience & 300,000 successful migrations, we can help you migrate your website from GoDaddy to WordPress seamlessly, accurately, and securely.

With our All-in-One migration package, you can transfer most of the data, such as products, customers, etc., from GoDaddy to WordPress instead of just transferring some contents through manual migration.

If you want to know more about our All-in-One migration service, you can check out the video below.

Next, we will show you detailed steps to transfer GoDaddy to WordPress with our All-in-One service.

Step 1: You schedule a meeting with LitExtension

To begin with, fill out the form to schedule a free one-on-one meeting with us over Google Meet. For more convenience, please schedule your meeting at least two hours in advance and email us your issues beforehand.

Step 2: You receive a tailored technical consultant

During the virtual meeting, our migration experts will first listen to your specific expectations and requests. Then, we will provide you with technical consultation regarding the size and complexity of your GoDaddy website’s database.

Once we have a clear understanding of your migration needs, our specialist will present a proposal outlining the necessary steps, cost estimates, and other relevant details.

Step 3: LitExtension configures migration

Then, based on our mutual agreement from the meeting, our migration experts will proceed with configuring your migration from GoDaddy to WordPress.

If you have any further customizations or special requirements, don’t hesitate to let us know in the Customization Requirements box, and our sales specialist will contact you for a price estimate.

Step 4: Our migration experts run a free demo migration

In the next stage, LitExtension experts will perform a free demo migration with a small set of data, including product, customer, and order information. This will provide you with a clearer grasp of the migration process and its effectiveness.

*Please note that if your total entities are under 2000, the demo migration will be skipped unless you request us to perform one.

Once the demo migration is finished, we will inform you so that you can assess its results. If you have any comments regarding the demo migration results, feel free to discuss them with our migration specialists. Otherwise, we will proceed to the full migration.

Step 5: We perform full GoDaddy to WordPress migration

Then, we will perform the complete WordPress migration process. At this stage, the migration will run smoothly and securely on our servers without requiring your PC to stay on. Your existing GoDaddy website will continue to operate normally during the migration, ensuring no disruption to your business.

While the migration is in progress, our Smart Controller tool will continuously monitor it. This tool will alert us to any issues, allowing us to fix them as soon as possible.

Step 6: We check full GoDaddy to WordPress migration results

After the migration is complete, your Personal Assistant (PA) will inspect both the front and back ends of your WordPress website to confirm everything has been transferred without any error.

Once finished, our PA will inform you of the migration results. Please check it thoroughly, and feel free to ask your PA if you have any questions or concerns.

Step 7: You receive post-migration support

With our All-In-One package, you will get free post-migration services. This includes:

• Recent Data Migration: We will transfer all your new orders and customers to your WordPress website.
• Re-Migration: If the first migration does not meet your expectations, you can request our specialist to do a re-migration.
• Smart Update: We will simultaneously import your latest and previously changed data into your WordPress site.

The most awesome part is that these post-migration services are free as long as the number of migration entities is less than 10% of the first migration. Additionally, you can access these services at your fingertips for 6 months after the Full Migration.

If the amount of data is more than 10%, you will have to pay an additional fee. The cost for these services varies depending on the entities you have.

How to Perform GoDaddy to WordPress Migration Manually?

If you don’t want to hire an expert for any reason, you can still manually migrate GoDaddy to WordPress.

Step 1: Back up your GoDaddy website

1. Back up your content

Before starting to move GoDaddy website builder site to WordPress, you should back up all content on your website first. There are several methods for you to back up your GoDaddy site content.

Firstly, if you only have some pages of content and images, you can back up your content simply by copying the text into Word files and saving your images to your computer as well. To organize your files better, you should create separate files for each website page.

Secondly, you can quickly back up your content by visiting each page on your website and saving each one as a file. Press “CTRL+S” (or “Command+S” for Mac) to open the save dialog box. Next, choose “Webpage, Complete” in the Save as type field.

Another option is to use a free tool called HTTrack to save all pages of your GoDaddy website to your computer.

Once you have installed this tool, open it, fill in the required information, and click “Next.”

Next, fill in your website’s URL and click the button “Next.”

Although this tool is useful, there is one drawback that you should be aware of. Since the GoDaddy website and its themes store their database on different CDN servers, there might be some errors during the process of saving your images.

So, remember to double-check all your data after the saving progress is completed to ensure that there is no issue.

2. Back up your link structure

The next important step is backing up your link structure. If you don’t save your URLs, your customers will not be able to find your website with the old links, and this will badly affect your webpage. Backing up your old URLs will help you redirect your customers to your new WordPress site.

You will need to save all of the URLs on your website into a list in order to back up your link structure. If the number of your website URLs is few, you can simply copy and paste them into a file on your computer.

Or, you can use a free online tool on the Chrome store, such as Klipper, to extract all URLs of your website.

Once you have added it to your Chrome extension, open it on your website homepage and follow the instructions.

Step 2: Set up a new WordPress site

After backing up all data and URLs from your GoDaddy website, let’s create a WordPress website.

1. Install WordPress

You can go to WordPress.org to download and use WordPress for free. If you need more detailed instruction, please read here.

2. Choosing a Hosting service

Then, you have to choose a hosting service for your website since WordPress is a self-hosted website builder.

If you have already registered for hosting with GoDaddy’s hosting service, you can use it for your new WordPress website. (Remember to deactivate your GoDaddy website builder service before connecting your new WordPress store to GoDaddy’s hosting service.)

Step 3: Point your domain name to new WordPress hosting service

This step is for users who registered a domain name with GoDaddy and want to use it with a new WordPress hosting service. If you don’t register a domain name with GoDaddy, you can skip this step.

You can point your domain to a new hosting service simply by changing its nameservers to those of the hosting company you registered with before. If you need more detailed information, please follow the instructions here.

Step 4: Import all your GoDaddy website content into WordPress

Now, it’s time to import all content from your GoDaddy website into your new WordPress site.

In the WordPress dashboard, move to the “Pages” section and choose “Add new” to import your pages to your new website.

After uploading your content completely, double-check it and click the “Publish” button to make your page live on the website.

To import your blog posts, move to the “Posts” section and do the uploading pages.

Step 5: Setup redirects

Then, you can start setting up redirects. By doing so, search engines will guide your customers to your new website when they use the old URLs to search for your pages.

You can easily do this by installing redirect plugins to your WordPress website.

These plugins are easy to use. You just need to fill in your old URLs and the new URLs you want to redirect.

For example, we use 301 Redirects – Easy Redirect Manager by Webfactory LTD:

Click the button “Save” to save the redirect.

Step 6: Check the result, customize, and go live with your WordPress website

After moving GoDaddy to WordPress completely, you should thoroughly recheck all the content on your new website.

Once the initial setup is complete, you can personalize your WordPress site. You can choose a new theme from a vast array of themes that suit your brand’s aesthetic and functionality needs.

Additionally, you can enhance your site’s capabilities by installing various plugins, which can add features like SEO optimization, social media integration, e-commerce functionality, contact forms, and more.

After customizing your website to your satisfaction, you can make it live, allowing your customers to access and interact with your content seamlessly.