This tutorial will show explain how to migrate a ZenCart shop from one host to another host. This might be necessary when moving to another how. Or you may want to make a "clone" of a production live shop on a development test server for testing and development work.

"Cloning" is essentially the same a "migrating" except you do not delete the store from the old host.

In either case, to set up a new shop on a new host with all the information and look-and-feel of the old shop on the old host, take a look at this ZenCart article.

The thing you have to remember is that you never overwrite the two configure files that are on the servers. The config files belong to the server in which they were created; they do not move from one server to another. The two configure files are includes/configure.php and admin/includes/configure.php.

If Cloning on a Development Server

Remember that your new host will have all the same database values of your old host. If you are cloning the shop for testing purposes, remember to change the admin email and also the order email notifications. Also uninstall all the payment modules, otherwise order will in your new host will go to the PayPal account that is existing in your old host.

Testing and Possible Errors

You need to test throughly the new shop after the migration, especially going through the checkout process. Sometimes it may look fine, but have problem in a few pages. If you get warnings like "header already sent", see this thread about possible file corruption. Sometime due to the heavy file transferring back and forth or via webhost web editors, some extra lines or space may got added or deleted. Also check the two config files for that and possible missing PHP end tags.