Noob here, so be patient.
We have a WordPress site hosted by a third party provider that is completely unresponsive. It runs on an old version of PHP (7.4.33). We were never able to access FTP/SFTP, phpMyAdmin or any other management interface other than WP-ADMIN.
We would like to move this site to Google Cloud Platform, which has an out-of-the-box stake based on PHP 8, complete with all the necessary dependencies needed to run a modern WordPress site.
I was able to successfully deploy a test site using GCP, then I used the all-in-one plugin to download a .wpress backup of the site from the old WP-ADMIN interface. I installed the all-in-one plugin in the new GCP implementation and tried to import the .wpress file I exported from the old site.
Import failed due to difference between PHP versions. After much reading I have come to the following:
- Deploying to a VM with PHP version 7 and then upgrading to version 8 is bad practice and a security risk
- It is a good practice to upgrade the existing site to PHP 8 and then migrate to the new site that already has PHP 8 installed.
However, as mentioned, there is no way I can upgrade PHP on the old site. Given the limitations I outlined, what is the right approach to safely migrate my site?
#Migrating #PHP #based #site #server #access