How to Safely Migrate from WordPress.com to a New Hosting Service
We’ve already discussed the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, as well as the key benefits they offer to novice bloggers. Although they have considerably different purposes, both represent an easy way to get started building a beautiful website with minimum technical knowledge.
However, it typically takes just a couple of months until a dedicated blogger gains some serious following and realizes the hosting resources provided by a free WordPress.com plan are not enough for maintaining a successful website. At this point, bloggers can either upgrade to premium WordPress hosting or find another, potentially more affordable solution to continue growing their user base.
Premium hosting options provide you with more bandwidth and storage resources, as well as better hosting support. However, exciting as it may seem, changing a web hosting provider can also be quite stressful, especially if you haven’t previously prepared a step-by-step migration plan.
Maintaining the excellent user experience during the migration process
Whatever the point at which you decide to move your website to another hosting service, you need to make sure this won’t disrupt user experience on your website. For one, you should start the migration process at the time of day your users are least active on your website to ensure minimum disruptions in case something goes wrong.
More importantly, you need to ensure that the URL structure of your pages, posts and categories remains the same, so that your website wouldn’t lose its SEO value. This will also require you to notify Googlebots about the change at the right moment, especially if you notice unusual logs on your website.
But first things first! Before every single change to your website’s code or structure, the first step is:
1. Backup!
To make sure none of your data will be lost during the migration process, you need to back up your entire database. We already talked about the exact steps for backing up a WordPress site, pointing out that this should be a regular activity regardless of whether you’re changing something on your website or don’t. Once you’re sure you have the latest copy of your website in case something goes wrong, you can start moving the resources to a better place.
2. Test your new hosting infrastructure
Like with most other website-related activities, testing whether particular segments work is crucial. Upload a copy of your site to your new hosting provider and make sure it works. When we say “it works”, we mean you should test your site thoroughly to see if all the aspects of user-website interaction are working without any glitches. The second thing you should check is that Googlebot can access the new hosting infrastructure using the Fetch as Google function in Search Console.
Also, be sure to check the TTL value for your DNS as lowering the DNS’s value can make your site move go faster. Since DNS settings are normally cached by ISPs based on the specified Time to Live or TTL setting, your move can be a quite a drag if the TTL is set to a long time. So, consider lowering it about a week before the site move to help users move to the new site faster. The last thing you need to do before the move is to make sure your Search Console verification will continue to work after your site has been moved. If you use the HTML file method to verify ownership of your site in Search Console, don’t forget to include your current verification file in your new copy of the site.
3. Move your website
Once your new site copy is working properly, you’re ready to make the big move. But before you start the move, you need to remove any temporary blocks to crawling. As some webmasters use a robots.txt file to disallow all crawling by Googlebot and other crawlers while building the new site copy, one needs to make sure any such blocks are removed before the actual site move. The move starts by updating the DNS settings to point to the new hosting provider. Be sure to ask your DNS provider all the necessary details on how to properly update your DNS settings. Remember, making every single change transparent to Googlebots will help you preserve your rankings and maintain the popularity or your website.
4. Watch for potential changes in traffic
When the site move is initiated, you need to be alert and ready to deal with possible glitches and issues. Make sure you are monitoring the server logs on both new and old servers. During the move, as DNS setting is being transmitted, you will notice a certain drop in traffic on your old servers and a corresponding traffic rise on the new servers. If possible, try using different public DNS checking tools. Also, make sure that different ISPs around the world are updating to your new DNS settings correctly, while you monitor the Crawl Stats and Crawl Errors graphs in Search Console as well.
5. Shut down old hosting
The last step is by far the easiest one. All you need to do is check the server logs on the old server and shut it down once the traffic there has reached zero. All this may take 12 to 24 hours, so don’t panic if you don’t see an immediate drop. During this time, your visitors would be able to access your website contents normally, regardless of the sets of hosted files presented.
Once your old hosting infrastructure is off, the site move is finally complete and you are free to go and grab a beer, or two.
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