Updated 27th September 2020 to consider restart of all services where restarting just apache isn’t enough, and also to share choice when it comes to import first vs SSL first as you may lose permalinks. Thanks to Peter and Simon in the comments.
The AWS Lightsail service is great. Click a few buttons and you have a powerful VPS with WordPress up and running for only a few dollars a month. The Bitnami integration allows you to choose from a whole set of Stacks to include upon setup. The LAMP option allows a competent PHP developer to run almost anything on Lightsail.
But after a while running the Lightsail VPS the setup is going to get stale, and because Bitnami bundles everything up, it’s not recommended to go poking around with only a few parts of it.
That’s the challenge I was faced with. Logging into the WordPress admin console a message is displayed which is telling me WordPress would prefer a newer version of PHP please. My version was old and not receiving security updates.
I read a fair bit about my options, but after looking at the choices I decided the best thing was to do an export and import onto a new Lightsail instance.
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