5 Tips for Migrating Your Website to a New Service

Most people move their websites because the service that they are getting is not what they need. If you are only moving your site because you think hosting might be better on the other side, you might want to reconsider. Changing hosts can be a lot of work and unless there is a good reason, it is safer to leave your site where it is.

If you are trying to migrate from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, this would be a case where you would want to make the move. When you are on WordPress.com, you do not have the control over your site that you need to have. You cannot use outside plugins since the .com WordPress is not open source. You only have access to the options they offer. When you use WordPress.org, you are able to fix your site anyway that you want, use any plugins that you want and not have to worry about what anyone is going to say.

#1 – Complete Your Move Before Canceling Your Service

Before you cancel your current host, you need to have your move totally done. You might think that you have enough time to move between the time that you cancel and the time that your service is going to run out, but this is not a safe game to play. If the migration process takes longer than expected, you could lose your whole site because of not having everything transferred over in time.

#2 – Download All of Your Backup Files

Make sure you have every single file that your site needs to function backed up. If you have all of your files backed up, you will be able to replace anything that is lost in the move. While you hope that you aren’t going to have to use your backup, it is good to make sure that you have a backup of your site anytime that you make a change. If you make a change on your page after you did your backup and your site goes down, you will not have the change that you made after the backup.

#3 – Make the Transfer

Once everything is ready, your new hosting provider should have a migration team that takes care of your move complimentary or for a small charge. Even though the team is going to handle the migration, you need to watch your site to make sure there is nothing wrong going on with it. If there is something going awry with your site it could be because some of the files were placed incorrectly. You can report anything strange that you see with your site to the migration team.

#4 – Make Sure the Databases Are In Proper Working Order

If you see other errors that need to be fixed, you may find out that the databases are not in the proper working order. Ask the hosting customer support to check on the files to ensure that they were set up properly when the transfer was done.

#5 – Switch to New Name Servers

Now it is time to let the domain registrars know to use new domain name servers. You shouldn’t make any changes to your site since your site has not had time to go through the complete propagation process. Once the process has taken place, you should check through your entire site to make sure that everything is functioning properly. Check all photos, links and other content on the site to make sure everything is as it should be and make any fixes as necessary.

Setting Up Your Site Properly

When you are working on setting your set up properly, there are some checks that you need to get done after your site is up. One of the things that you need to check is how your site speed is. If your notice that you have a drastic decrease in site speed, you should run a check through a site like Pingdom to see what is causing your site to be so slow. There is likely something that happened in the move that is causing the site to load slow when people are trying to visit it. There are a lot of different reasons it could be going slow and this tool will help you see what those reasons are as well as what is having the most impact on your site’s speed.

If your site continues to go slow, you may have chosen a hosting package that is too small for your website. You need to make sure that you have enough space on your hosting to service the number of visitors that you have coming to your site. If you don’t have enough bandwidth for your site to serve those visitors, your site will go down until you have more bandwidth available again.

Conclusion

Being a webmaster isn’t always simple, but the rewards of having a well functioning website can be great. If you learn about writing compelling content that will walk your customers through the sales process and how to increase conversions, you can create an online asset that can pay dividends.

Once you have your site moved to the new serve and it has completed propagation, you are ready to start updating your site with any new content that you might want to put on your site. It will now be able to save and not be lost in the transition since the transition is over.

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