How to move a Joomla website

So I've been volunteering for an NGO called Otra Cosa Network in Peru and as part of my volunteering I have been teaching young children to swim, but of course I get roped into helping with their website.  A busman's holiday I know..!

So their existing website is using Joomla so the first step for me is to back a backup copy of the existing Joomla website.

I found JoomlaPack, which is now called Keeba Backup, which can be found here:

https://www.akeebabackup.com/download.html

They recommend you follow the videos on their website

https://www.akeebabackup.com/videos/1212-akeeba-backup-core/1615-abtc01-installation-first-backup.html

Now that you are able to backup the website, I needed to restore the live website to backup site, to do this you need to download Keeba KickStart and unzip the files, taking just the kickstart.php file which you'll need to add to the root folder of the new website, also copy across the backup file you wish to restore.

A backup of your web site is only useful if you can restore it - perhaps you need to transfer your web host or even move the site from a development server to a live server.

Like always I have attached the version I worked with at the bottom of this post.

Here is a step by step process for you to restore the backup you have just taken:

Or you can watch the video here

1. To begin with, take a brand new backup of your web site.
2. Once the backup is complete, go to Manage Backups and download the backup file to your computer.
3. Now we've downloaded the backup file, we need an additional program called Kickstart which you can find at the akeebabackup.com web site.
4. Go to downloads. Scroll down to Akeeba Kickstart and click Download to download the file to your computer.
5. The Kickstart program is NOT a Joomla extension. Here we can see that the Kickstart program is a zip file and we need to extract that.
6. On most operating systems you can do that simply by double clicking on the file name.
7. We can see we now have a new folder with all the kickstart files in it.
8. The only one that you actually need is the kickstart.php file; all the rest are language translations.
9. We now need to transfer the kickstart.php and our backup to our brand new web host, and to do that we will use a FTP program.
10. I am going to use filezilla but you can use any ftp program that you like.
11. To begin with, connect to your NEW server.
12. Once connected, make sure you are in the public html or the web root of your server.
13. Now you need to transfer the backup file from our local computer to our live server. I am just going to pick that up and drag it across.
14. You can see the upload is taking place. We now have the backup file on the new server.
15. We now need to take that kickstart.php file and do exactly the same thing. Select it and drag it across.
16. That's it with the filezilla for now so let's go back to our web browser and go to our brand new web site.
17. As you can see I have a holding page in place to show that the web site is coming soon.
18. So just go to the special url for kickstart.php. The kickstart program is now running.
19. Kickstart is NOT an installation program, it is a special archive extraction tool.
20. We can click here to remove this message and we can see here that it has detected the archive file.
21. We have several methods of extracting the files. On most good web hosts, we can use the hybrid method.
22. Finally click START to begin the extract process.
23. Kickstart has now extracted the backup file and provides a link to the installer that was built in to that backup.
24. The installer is a very simple process. We begin with the required settings. As you can see, they are all set to yes. If any are set to No, you won't be able to proceed and you need to speak to your web hosts to rectify the errors.
25. We can now click Next.
26. I know need to enter the database connection details that I have got from my web host.
27. Enter the server hostname (which is usually localhost, but that may depend on your hosting) and your DATABASE username and password. And finally the database name that you want to install your web site on. Again this is something that your host will have provided to you or you will have set up yourself within your hosts control panel.
28. And click next.
29. The restoration process of the database has now been processed and we can click to continue.
30. We have now have the opportunity if we wish to change the site name and the email address. In most cases when you are restoring a site you won't need to do this.
31. If we scroll down there is also the opportunity to change the password and email address of the Super Administrator.
32. Finally, click Next again.
33. The sites configuration has all been setup.
34. Now what we need to do is close this window and when we are now back at the Akeeba Kickstart program and click on Cleanup.
35. This will remove the kickstart.php file and that big backup archive.
36. Now that we're done we can visit our website and here we can see that the web site has now been transferred from our old hosting account to our new one.

com_akeeba-4.5.5-core.zip (2.48 mb)

kickstart-core-4.1.4.zip (267.22 kb)