old WHMCS update process planning

[Walther]

Problem:
I have a fairly old WHMCS installation (WHMCS 7.10.2 and PHP 7.3.3), which is now at the end of its useful life.
The current WHMCS installation is used for both the website (service presentation pages, price lists, “about us,” etc.) and the customer area.
(It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s not: it’s a mess, management is rigid, there’s no SEO optimisation, creating multilingual pages is a mess…)
So I was thinking of installing the new WHMCS in a different directory (e.g., my.example.com) and developing the main site with WP on example.com.
This way I could:

• leave the old WHMCS site running on example.com for as long as necessary
• develop the new customer area on my.example.com
• develop the new site offline
  Once everything is ready, I “just” need to:
• delete the site on example.com
• install the new WP site on example.com
• migrate the database from the old WHMCS installation to the new one
• set up a series of redirects in .htaccess from the old URLs to the new ones

My questions are:

• Did I miss something along the way? Is there something I haven’t thought of?
• I'll need to migrate the database from a WHMCS 7.3.3 installation to 8.13… which tables do I need to migrate? Can I do it from phpmyadmin, or are there differences in the database structure?

[zomex]

Your process sounds good apart from WHMCS.

I would never recommend trying to import tables to new files. You need to update your existing install as normal. You can update from your version but you may have more luck doing a manual update. 

Backup everything, upload the new v8.13 files, adjust your hosting/server settings to meet the requirements (e.g you may need to update PHP) then run the installation script. 

[Walther]

On 12/18/2025 at 10:42 PM, zomex said:

 

I would never recommend trying to import tables to new files. You need to update your existing install as normal. You can update from your version but you may have more luck doing a manual update. 

Backup everything, upload the new v8.13 files, adjust your hosting/server settings to meet the requirements (e.g you may need to update PHP) then run the installation script. 

It would be a nightmare.

A lot of add-on modules (that need to be updated too, cause of the different PHP version), and a lot of custom hooks (that also will need to be modified in order to work with a higher PHP version).
I guess it will last for at least a few working days, maybe more... so the straight update is not viable.

The database migration is also safest (anything going wrong during migration? Not an issue, just roll back and study how to fix it...)

So, again, the original question: according to WHMCS doc the database migration is a breeze ( https://docs.whmcs.com/8-13/system/system-tutorials/move-whmcs-to-a-new-server/ ), but will it work with such a high version difference?

[zomex]

1 hour ago, Walther said:

It would be a nightmare.

A lot of add-on modules (that need to be updated too, cause of the different PHP version), and a lot of custom hooks (that also will need to be modified in order to work with a higher PHP version).
I guess it will last for at least a few working days, maybe more... so the straight update is not viable.

The database migration is also safest (anything going wrong during migration? Not an issue, just roll back and study how to fix it...)

So, again, the original question: according to WHMCS doc the database migration is a breeze ( https://docs.whmcs.com/8-13/system/system-tutorials/move-whmcs-to-a-new-server/ ), but will it work with such a high version difference?

No matter how you update WHMCS in order to use the latest version you need to use the latest files which will have dependancies such as the newer PHP version. So it will always be a pain unfortunately.

The guide you linked to is about moving an installation which is essentially moving the files and database to a new server. There is no recommended option of importing an old database to new. You need to update the existing database by running the upgrade script as part of the upgrade process. Unfortunately there will be some pain with an upgrade of this scale but it's a fairly standard process. You need to upgrade your existing install once it's ready to support the latest version. That would involve updating your modules.