Five websites, five databases — and downloading them one by one eats your whole evening. There are faster routes, but each has an honest limit. This guide compares them so you pick the right one for your server.
Whether you are migrating hosts, making an offline safety copy, or setting up a test copy, the database is the part of a website you cannot afford to lose. Files can be re-uploaded; a lost database is gone. Below are the bulk download routes in honest order — quickest to set up first, fastest in bulk last.
A website database holds everything that matters — posts, products, orders, and your users' names, emails and password hashes. That is why this guide is about your own websites, or sites you administer with permission, and why the finished file needs careful handling (there is a full page on storing it safely).
Bulk simply means: many databases, one sitting, no babysitting each export.
cPanel, Plesk and similar panels have a Backup section that produces a full account backup — databases, files, email, everything — as one downloadable file.
Honest limit: a full backup is the whole account, so it is big and slow to download, and restoring one database out of it later is extra work. Best for a complete account move.
phpMyAdmin is already in almost every hosting panel, so there is nothing to install.
Honest limit: phpMyAdmin runs inside the browser under PHP time and memory limits. Small and medium databases export fine; a database of a few hundred megabytes often dies mid-export on shared hosting. That failure has its own page in this set.
If your hosting gives you SSH access, this is the fast route — the export runs on the server, not in your browser, so browser limits do not apply.
mysqldump -u dbuser -p mydatabase > mydatabase.sqlmysqldump -u root -p --all-databases --single-transaction --quick | gzip > all-databases.sql.gz--single-transaction gives a consistent copy of InnoDB tables without locking your live site, and --quick streams rows instead of loading the whole table into memory.
For WordPress specifically, wp db export backup.sql over SSH is one clean command per site, and loop it over your sites' folders for bulk. A reputable backup plugin also works and adds scheduling — but a plugin export is only as trustworthy as the plugin, so verify the file the same way as any other dump.
A download that looks finished can still be cut in half. Before you delete anything or cancel the old hosting:
An unverified backup is a hope, not a backup.
The full bulk database download process — live demo, every step on screen.
▶️ Watch Full Videomysqldump over SSH. The export runs on the server itself, compressed as it goes, and --all-databases takes every database in one command — no browser timeouts like phpMyAdmin has.
Yes — use the hosting panel's full backup, or phpMyAdmin per database. It is slower and large databases may hit PHP limits on shared hosting, but for small sites it works fine.
For your own websites, or websites you administer with the owner's permission, yes — that is normal backup and migration work. Downloading someone else's database without permission is not; every method here assumes the sites are yours to manage.