I asked AI to guide me through migrating a WordPress site to Hostinger. Every step looked simple. Every step broke.
Here's the short version of what actually happened:
Problem 1: Disk quota full, backup fails
The first 460MB export silently filled the server's disk quota. Every subsequent export failed with errno=122. Nobody told me. I just kept retrying.
Problem 2: 148MB file, PHP won't accept it
WordPress's default upload_max_filesize is 64MB. The backup was 148MB. The import page said "connection lost." Took me an hour to figure out I needed to edit PHP options in hPanel.
Problem 3: SSL only covered the bare domain
Installed SSL before DNS finished propagating. Certificate signed for domain.com only, not www. Visitors got a certificate mismatch warning.
Problem 4: WordPress escaped & to & inside JavaScript
A QR code feature broke because WordPress's content filter mangled the & in a URL string inside a <script> tag. The fix: String.fromCharCode(38) instead of a literal &.
Problem 5: LiteSpeed Cache blocked dynamically-set image src
Lazy loading intercepted JS-assigned img.src values. Images appeared blank. Fix: create a new <img> element with createElement instead of updating an existing one.
None of these are exotic edge cases. All of them are waiting for you.
AI guided me through diagnosing every single one of these — I couldn't have done it alone. But it didn't prevent them from happening. That's not a criticism of AI; it's just the nature of migration work. The problems only surface when you actually run it.
Full write-up with exact commands and fixes:
I Let AI Migrate My WordPress Site to Hostinger. It Went Horribly Wrong.
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