How to easily migrate a WordPress Site from IONOS to AWS Lightsail as a beginner.

Migrating a WordPress site from IONOS to AWS Lightsail can seem like a daunting task without much experience in the field of website migration. Despite this, with the right tools,  the task can be broken down into a few simple steps by using the “All-in-One Wp Migration” plugin (All-In-One WP Migration). 

So why migrate? 

AWS Lightsail provides users with a reliable, cost effective and user friendly experience when hosting a website. Lightsail makes use of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, allowing for affordable pricing on a website that is always available. 

This guide can walk you through all the steps, ensuring the migration flows smoothly.

Preparations for migrations

Before beginning a migration, there are some simple steps you should take in order to prepare your site for a migration 

One step can be to create a backup of your site incase of any mishaps.

Next is to create your WordPress instance in AWS Lightsail.

Begin this by logging in or creating an Amazon Lightsail account and opening onto the main page. To create an instance, click the create instance button. Select Linux/Unix as the platform, and WordPress as the blueprint. Once created your Instance should appear on your instances page.

In preparation for the next step, you will need to open up the WordPress admin panel. To do this start by opening your instance on Lightsail, next copy the public IPv4 address, and paste this into a new tab followed by /admin (e.g. xx.xxx.xxx.xx/admin). The default username for WordPress is typically user, but you can confirm this in the instance settings. To retrieve the password, click on the Retrieve Default Password button in Lightsail and follow the instructions provided. Once you have the password, enter it into the WordPress login page along with the username to access the admin panel. 

You will also need to log into your Ionos WordPress admin panel using a similar set of steps.

Beginning the migration

Begin by installing the All-In-One WP Migration plugin on both source, and destination site dashboards.

After this, from your source site, you can access the plugin on the left hand side tab and begin the migration by clicking Export and selecting Export to File.

Once the export is complete, you are able to download the file to your system.

The next set of steps apply to your destination site.

From your destination site you may need to adjust values for upload size and post max size for WordPress. This can be easily done by following a few steps.

Begin by connecting to the instance from the instances page

Click the rectangular button on the top right to connect to the server using SSH.

From here, you can Enter the command “sudo vi +/upload_max_filesize /opt/bitnami/php/etc/php.ini”

Your page may look something like this:

This should allow you to edit the value of upload_max_filesize first, where you can set this to any value. For example, “300M”.

You next need to locate “post_max_size”, which you can change to any value again.

After this, press the escape key, and then enter the command: “:wq!”

This command will save the file and changes you made.

Finally to bring these changes into action you need to restart the server using the command: “sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart”

Import The Migration

As a final step to complete the migration, all you need to do is import the migration file by opening the import tab and selecting import from file, followed by selecting the file you downloaded from the export.


These steps should allow you to easily migrate from Ionos to lightsail in an easy and hassle free way, they can also apply to migrating between any wordpress hosts with only a few minor tweaks. 

Written By Caden