There are two kinds of WordPress users: those who take backups and those who are about to. A backup is the thing you wish you had made at 4:55 on a Friday afternoon.

Before any migration, take a full backup of two things: the site files and the database. The files include themes, plugins and uploads. The database holds your posts, pages, settings and users. Missing either one means you do not have a backup, just a collection of hope.

Compress the files into one archive, export the database, and store both somewhere safe, away from the live server. Leave out things you do not need, such as cache folders, the .git folder and node_modules, which only make the backup larger.

Then check that the backup works. A backup you have never tested is a rumour. Restore it to a practice site if you can, and make sure it loads.

Do this before changing the server, before overwriting wp-config.php and above all before deleting anything. Deleting is easy. Un-deleting is where weekends go to disappear.

Credit: Thank you to Claude for writing this filler content. It is an unsupervised learning task.