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Migrating a WordPress or PHP site to ARM web hosting in the UK

Moving a WordPress or PHP site to ARM web hosting in the UK is one of the easiest migrations there is, because PHP code never sees the processor. This guide covers what to check before you migrate to ARM, how to move the files and the database, and what changed when we moved our own PHP site onto ARM in August 2026.

VPS GB runs only ARM, including the server this website is on.

Why PHP does not care

PHP is interpreted. Your .php files, WordPress core, themes and nearly every plugin are text that the PHP interpreter reads and runs. The interpreter has an ARM64 build, so the same files behave the same way. There is nothing to recompile.

The database is the same story: MariaDB and MySQL run natively on ARM64, and a database dump is plain SQL that does not care where it was made.

Check these before you move

The exceptions are the small parts of a site that are not plain PHP:

  • Plugins that ship their own compiled programs. Some image optimisers, backup tools and security scanners bundle a binary rather than calling a service. Look in the plugin's folder for executables, or check its documentation for ARM64 or "aarch64" support. Many fall back to a slower pure-PHP mode, or to a hosted API, when their binary cannot run.
  • Encoded or licence-protected code. A theme or plugin protected by an encoder needs that vendor's loader, built for ARM64 Linux. Check the vendor supports it before you move.
  • The PHP version. This is unrelated to ARM but catches more migrations than anything else. Our ARM web hosting currently runs PHP 8.4, so make sure WordPress, your theme and your plugins support it. Test on a copy first.
  • Extensions your code needs. Run php -m on the old host and compare. The common ones (mysqli, gd or imagick, curl, mbstring, intl, zip) are all available on ARM64.

Moving a WordPress site

  1. Take a backup you have tested. Files and database, kept somewhere other than the old host.
  2. Export the database. With WP-CLI: wp db export site.sql. Without it: mysqldump --single-transaction dbname > site.sql. Or use a migration plugin, which does both halves for you.
  3. Copy the files. All of WordPress, or at least wp-content/ and wp-config.php. On VPS GB web hosting you upload over FTP; the details are on your order page.
  4. Import the database. Your hosting database only accepts connections from the server itself, so you cannot point a desktop client at it. A migration plugin, which runs on the site, works well here. If you are not sure how to get your database across, ask us before you order.
  5. Update wp-config.php with the new database name, user and password. The host is localhost.
  6. If the address changes, use wp search-replace 'https://old.example' 'https://new.example', or a plugin that understands serialised data. A plain find-and-replace on the SQL file corrupts serialised PHP values.
  7. Test before you switch DNS. Point your own computer at the new server with an entry in your hosts file and click through the site: logins, forms, uploads, checkout if you have one.
  8. Lower your DNS TTL a day ahead, then switch. Keep the old host until you are sure nothing is still arriving there.

On an ARM VPS instead of web hosting the steps are the same, with more control: install nginx or Apache, PHP-FPM and MariaDB from your distribution's packages, which are built for arm64, and import with mysql or wp db import directly.

What changed when we moved our own site

This website and its database moved onto an ARM64 virtual machine on our own Ampere hardware on 21 August 2026: PHP 8.4, MariaDB and nginx, all native aarch64 builds. The honest account is that the processor was the least eventful part.

  • The software stack compiled and installed natively, with no ARM-specific changes to our code.
  • The real ARM limit was the operating system matrix. The hosting control panel we use publishes ARM64 builds for some distribution releases and not others, so the release we could use was decided by that, not by our preference. If you depend on a panel or agent, check its ARM support for the exact distribution version, not just "Linux".
  • What took the work was not ARM at all. Moving from Apache to nginx meant rewriting .htaccess rules, which nginx does not read, and PHP's separate configuration for the command line and the web server meant a setting had to be changed in two places. Both would have bitten us on x86 too.

That is the pattern we see generally: for a PHP site, a move to ARM is a hosting migration like any other, and the architecture is rarely the part that goes wrong.

If your site is WordPress or plain PHP, it will very likely run on ARM as it is. To check anything unusual first, the five-minute check on our ARM page covers it, and so does is ARM good for servers?.

VPS GB runs only 64-bit ARM, hosted in the UK. Why we chose ARM, and what does and does not run on it.