The email that usually starts this process is the renewal notice. You signed up at $2.95 a month, and the invoice in front of you says $143.88 for the year ahead — plus the domain, plus whatever SiteLock upsell got attached along the way. I’ve moved a lot of sites off Bluehost over twenty-plus years of running websites, and it’s almost always that email that finally pushes people out the door.
Here’s the part nobody tells you: most of the top search results for “how to migrate from bluehost to another host” are written by Bluehost. They are not motivated to make leaving feel easy. Done in the right order, the actual move takes one afternoon of hands-on work, your visitors never see a broken site, and the only genuinely dangerous step is the one everyone skips — email. This guide walks the whole sequence, in order, with the free tools your new host gives you.
In this guide
Grab everything before you touch anything
Migrations go wrong when people start moving things before they’ve inventoried what they have. While your Bluehost account is still fully alive, collect the following — it takes fifteen minutes and it’s the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy.
- A full backup you control. Not Bluehost’s backup — yours. Run an export with a plugin like UpdraftPlus or Duplicator and download it to your own machine.
- Screenshots of your DNS zone. Every A record, CNAME, MX, and TXT record. You will want these when something obscure — a verification record, an old subdomain — stops working three weeks later.
- A list of every email address on the domain. Including the forwarding-only ones people forget exist. This list drives the whole email section below.
- Your PHP version. Match it (or go newer) on the destination so plugins don’t misbehave on arrival.
- Domain status. If your domain is registered at Bluehost, you don’t have to transfer it today — you can leave it there and just repoint DNS. If you do want it out, unlock it and request the EPP code now, because transfers take days.
Pick your destination first
The migration tooling lives on the destination side, so choose the new host before you touch the old one. For Bluehost refugees I usually point people at one of two exits, depending on budget.
If you left because of the renewal price, Hostinger is the natural landing spot — ~$3–12/mo at the time of writing, noticeably faster than the shared box you’re leaving, and its migration tool does the heavy lifting for free. If you left because of performance or you’re running anything that makes money, Cloudways gets you managed cloud servers on DigitalOcean, Vultr, or AWS from ~$11–14/mo, with a free migrator plugin and a support team that actually reads your ticket. I run sites on both; the honest comparison is in our Hostinger vs Cloudways breakdown.
If you’re wondering whether to spend more for a fully managed platform instead, start with is managed WordPress hosting worth it — the short answer is “yes, above a certain revenue line” — and the current picks live in our best managed WordPress hosting guide. The full roster of everything we test is on the recommended hosting page.
Move the site with free migration tools
You should not pay anyone to move a standard WordPress site off Bluehost. Every host worth moving to ships a free migrator, and they all work the same way: the new host pulls a copy of your site while the old one keeps serving traffic. Nothing goes down because nothing gets deleted.
| Hostinger auto-migrator | Cloudways migrator plugin | Manual (any host) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you need | Your WP admin login | Plugin installed on the Bluehost site | UpdraftPlus/Duplicator archive + FTP |
| Typical time | 30 min–3 hrs, hands-off | 30 min–2 hrs, hands-off | 1–3 hrs of your time |
| Best for | Most sites under ~5 GB | Bigger or busier sites | Broken wp-admin, odd setups |
On Hostinger, it’s hPanel → Websites → Migrate: hand over the WordPress admin credentials for the Bluehost site and their system copies everything to the new server automatically. On Cloudways, you install the Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin on the Bluehost site, paste in the destination details from your Cloudways dashboard, and it streams the whole site over. In both cases you get a temporary preview URL when it finishes — that URL is the star of the next step.
The manual route — export an archive, upload it, restore — still works fine, and it’s the fallback when a migrator chokes on a huge database or a security plugin blocks the connection. But try the free tool first. In my experience it succeeds on the first run for the large majority of ordinary sites.
Test before you flip DNS
Right now you have two complete copies of your site: the live one on Bluehost and the new one sitting behind a preview URL. Do not change DNS until the new copy passes inspection. Click through your ten most important pages. Log into wp-admin. Submit every form — contact, checkout, newsletter — and confirm the submissions arrive. Check that the SSL certificate on the new server is issued and valid for your domain (most hosts provision it automatically once DNS points at them, but staging certs let you verify the rest first).
Want to test the real domain against the new server before the public cutover? Edit your computer’s hosts file to point your domain at the new server’s IP. Your machine — and only your machine — will see the new site on the real URL, cookies, HTTPS and all. It’s a five-minute trick that has caught broken permalinks and hard-coded URLs for me more times than I can count.
The zero-downtime DNS cutover
Downtime during a migration is almost always a DNS mistake, and it’s entirely avoidable because of one fact: during propagation, both copies of your site are live. Visitors whose DNS has updated see the new server; everyone else sees Bluehost. Nobody sees an error. Your job is just to keep both copies identical while the world catches up.
- 24–48 hours before: lower the TTL on your domain’s A record to 300 seconds. This tells resolvers worldwide to re-check frequently, which shrinks the switchover window from a day to minutes for most visitors.
- Cutover moment: pick a quiet window, freeze content — no new posts, and pause orders or comments if you run any — then update the A record (or nameservers) to the new host.
- After: with a 300-second TTL, most traffic lands on the new server within an hour. Stragglers on sluggish ISP resolvers can take 24–48 hours, which is exactly why the Bluehost copy stays untouched and online.
One nuance: changing just the A record is faster and keeps your existing mail records intact. Changing nameservers moves everything at once — including MX records — so if you go that route, make sure the new DNS zone already contains your mail settings before you switch. This is where those screenshots from step one earn their keep.
Email — the step that burns people
Here is the single most expensive mistake in host migrations: the site moves perfectly, the owner cancels Bluehost, and every @yourdomain mailbox vanishes with the account. The website was never the fragile part. Email is.
If your mailboxes live at Bluehost, they need a new home before you cancel anything. Hostinger includes email hosting on most plans, so budget movers can recreate their mailboxes there. Cloudways doesn’t host mailboxes (it offers a paid add-on), and premium managed platforms like Kinsta and WP Engine don’t host email at all — that’s normal for the category, not a defect. For anything business-critical I’d put mail on a dedicated provider like Google Workspace or Zoho regardless of host, so your email never depends on where your website lives again.
The safe sequence: create the new mailboxes first, update your MX records to the new mail provider, send and receive a test from every address, then leave the old Bluehost mailboxes alive for another week or two to catch stragglers. If there’s history you care about, drag it across via IMAP in any desktop mail client before the old boxes go dark.
The don’t-cancel-yet checklist
Bluehost keeps billing until you cancel, which creates pressure to pull the trigger early. Resist it. The overlap costs you a few dollars; cancelling early can cost you your inbox. Cancel only when every box below is checked.
- Site loads from the new server — verify with a propagation checker like whatsmydns.net, not just your own browser.
- HTTPS is valid on the new host, with no mixed-content warnings.
- Every form and checkout works on the live domain, not just the preview URL.
- Email sends and receives on the new MX records, from every address on your list.
- Backups are running on the new host — don’t inherit the no-backup habit that made this move scary.
- Your domain is safe — either transferred out or confirmed renewable at Bluehost independently of the hosting plan.
On refunds: Bluehost has historically offered a money-back window on hosting (about 30 days) and pro-rating beyond it has varied — read the current terms before you assume anything. Whatever you’re owed, the domain is yours either way. I typically keep the old account alive for one to two weeks after cutover, then cancel and screenshot the confirmation.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to migrate from Bluehost to another host?
Plan for one afternoon of hands-on work spread across two or three days of elapsed time. The automated migration itself usually runs 30 minutes to a few hours; the elapsed time comes from lowering TTL in advance and letting DNS propagate afterward — both of which happen while you do other things.
Will my website go down when I switch hosts?
Not if you keep the Bluehost copy online through the cutover. During DNS propagation both servers hold a complete copy of your site, so every visitor sees a working version. Downtime only happens when people delete the old site or cancel the old account before propagation finishes.
Does Bluehost charge a fee to transfer my website away?
No. Your files and database are yours, and the free migration tools at hosts like Hostinger and Cloudways pull the site out without Bluehost’s involvement. A domain transfer is the only thing with a cost — typically about one year’s renewal paid to the new registrar, which usually extends your registration by a year.
Can I keep my domain at Bluehost after moving my hosting?
Yes. Domain registration and web hosting are separate services — point the domain’s A record or nameservers at your new host and the site moves while the registration stays put. Plenty of people run this way for a year and transfer the domain later, at renewal time, when it’s cheapest.
Should I cancel my Bluehost account right after migrating?
No — wait one to two weeks. You want the old copy alive as a safety net through DNS propagation, and you especially want the old mailboxes reachable until every email address is confirmed working at its new home. The small overlap in hosting fees is cheap insurance.
Want the guided version? Our free courses walk you through this start to finish — including “Launch Your First Website with Claude.”