Testing your WordPress website after Migration

At this point, you have done the work to migrate your website to Inmotion Hosting. The last step before taking the website live on our servers is to test your website. To do this, you will need to modify your hosts file on your computer.

How does a hosts file modification work?

When you visit your-wordpress-site.com in your web browser, you computer must first figure out which web server to contact to retrieve the webpage. It will find this information out by asking a nameserver. Think of a nameserver as the phonebook for websites. If you need to know someone’s phone number, you would find this information in a phonebook by looking it up. You computer does the same task, however instead of using a phonebook it will use a nameserver.

If your computer asks the nameserver where your-wordpress-site.com is located it will retrieve the location of your previous host, HostABC. Since this will display your live site, we cannot use this method without first modifying the hosts file on the computer. A Hosts file overrides the computer looking at the phonebook, and instead tells the computer where to go to retrieve the website by using a specific IP address (which would be the IP address associated with your account with InMotion Hosting). This change to the hosts file will only affect the computer that you modify. Any other visitors to your website will be directed to your site on HostABC. 

How to test using a hosts file modification?

 For more information regarding modifying your hosts file, please see either of the following links:

Windows 

Mac 

After you have tested your website on InMotion Hostings server, you can be reassured that when you change the domain’s nameservers there should be little or no issues with your WordPress website after the move. 

If you missed our previous article, please see the Configuring WordPress After a Migration tutorial. For more information on this course please visit Migrating your Existing WordPress site to InMotion Hosting

Was this article helpful? Join the conversation!

Server Madness Sale
Score Big with Savings up to 99% Off

X