What WordPress Migration Services Cover
A WordPress migration service is the professional moving of your website from one place to another, done so cleanly that your visitors and your search rankings never notice. That is the goal in one sentence, but the work behind it is broader than most people expect. A website is not a single file you drag across. It is a collection of parts that all have to arrive together and keep talking to each other in the new home.
When we migrate a site, we move the whole thing. That means the WordPress files and code, the database that holds your posts, pages, settings, and, for a store, your orders and customers. It means the entire media library of images and documents, every theme and plugin with its configuration intact, and all the little settings that make the site behave the way it does today. Miss any one of these and the new site looks right until someone clicks the wrong link or submits a form that quietly fails.
It also covers the parts people forget until they break. HTTPS certificates so the padlock stays green. Redirects so old links and search results still land in the right place. Email routing so your mail keeps flowing when the domain moves. DNS changes timed so the site never goes dark. A full test of every important page, form, checkout, and login before the switch goes live. This unglamorous checklist is exactly where DIY moves come apart, and it is exactly what you are paying a team to get right.
Put simply, a migration service takes the whole job off your plate and returns a site that works in its new home as well as or better than it did before. If that sounds like what you need, you can get a free quote and we will tell you what your move involves.
Types of Migration We Handle
Migration is a single word covering several very different jobs, and the right approach depends on which one you have. Some are quick and low risk. Others touch your domain, your rankings, and your ability to take orders, and they reward careful planning. Here are the main kinds we handle, and what makes each one distinct.
Host to host migration
The most common request. Your site stays exactly the same, but it moves from one hosting company or server to another, usually because the current host is slow, unreliable, expensive, or has poor support. Because the domain does not change, a clean host move is invisible to visitors and search engines. It is the lowest risk type, but it still has traps around DNS, email, and matching the server environment, which is why a smooth one still deserves care. Our guide on how to move WordPress to a new host covers the DIY version if you want to attempt it yourself.
Platform to WordPress migration
Moving onto WordPress from another website builder or content system. This is the biggest job of the group, because the two platforms store content in completely different shapes, so there is no simple copy. We export what can be exported, rebuild the design in WordPress, bring the content across, and set up redirects so your existing rankings carry over. The reward is a site you own outright with no lock in.
Domain change migration
Moving a site to a new domain name, often after a rebrand or a business name change. This is one of the more delicate moves because your entire search presence is tied to the old domain. Done right, with a full set of redirects and the right signals to search engines, the rankings follow you to the new name. Done carelessly, it can undo years of search work overnight.
WooCommerce store migration
Moving an online store, which adds orders, customers, products, stock levels, and payment settings to everything else. Stores are live systems where a lost order or a broken checkout costs real money, so they get the most careful handling and the most thorough testing before any switch.
HTTP to HTTPS migration
Securing an older site that still runs on the insecure connection. This involves installing a certificate, updating internal links and references, and redirecting the insecure address to the secure one so nothing breaks and no rankings are lost.
Why Hire Pros Instead of DIY
Plenty of guides, including ours, will walk you through migrating a site yourself, and for a small, simple site it is a reasonable weekend project. So why pay for it? The honest answer is that a migration is a job where the downside of a mistake is large and the mistakes are easy to make. You are moving a live business asset, and the parts that go wrong tend to go wrong quietly, showing up days later as lost orders, missing images, broken forms, or a slow slide in search traffic that nobody connects to the move.
A professional migration buys you a few specific things. The first is that nothing gets missed, because we work from a checklist honed over many moves and we test the result before it goes live rather than after. The second is that your rankings are protected, because we plan the redirects and URL structure deliberately instead of hoping it works out. The third is time and peace of mind. A migration you do yourself can eat a weekend and leave you anxiously checking the site for a week. One we do gives you back that time and the confidence that it was done right.
There is also the matter of what happens when something unexpected appears, because on a real site something usually does. A plugin that behaves differently on the new server, a database that is larger than the tools expect, a custom feature nobody documented. When you hit one of those alone, you are stuck. When we hit one, it is a Tuesday. Because we are developers, not just movers, we can fix the underlying problem rather than working around it or giving up. That is the real difference between a service and a tutorial.
| Aspect | Doing it yourself | Professional migration |
|---|---|---|
| Time cost | Your evenings and weekend, plus troubleshooting | Handed off; you carry on with business |
| Risk of downtime | Higher; mistakes surface after the switch | Low; tested before cutover |
| SEO and redirects | Easy to overlook, hard to undo | Planned and verified as standard |
| Store and order safety | Real risk of lost or duplicated orders | Handled with a controlled changeover |
| When something breaks | You are on your own | We fix it at the source |
| Peace of mind | Anxious checking for days | Confidence it was done right |
None of this means DIY is wrong. If your site is small and you enjoy the tinkering, our step by step guide to migrating a WordPress website will get you there. But if the site earns money, holds customer data, or simply matters too much to gamble on, the case for a professional move is strong.
What Goes Wrong With DIY Migrations
It helps to be specific about the failure modes, because they are predictable and they repeat. In our experience the same handful of problems account for most of the migrations we are called in to rescue after a self move went sideways.
Broken links and missing images
WordPress stores many links and image paths as full web addresses inside the database, often still pointing at the old location. Copy the files without updating those references and the new site loads with gaps where images should be and links that go nowhere. It looks like the images did not come across when in fact they are there but being requested from the wrong place.
Lost search rankings
The quiet killer. If URLs change and no redirects are put in place, every ranking page becomes a dead end for search engines and every backlink points at nothing. Traffic drains away over the following weeks, and by the time anyone notices, the cause is buried. Recovering lost rankings is far harder than preserving them, which is why redirects are not optional.
The site left invisible to search engines
WordPress has a setting that asks search engines not to index a site, meant for sites still under construction. It is common to build the new copy with that switch on and then forget to turn it off at launch. The site goes live looking perfect and slowly vanishes from search because it is politely asking not to be found.
Email outages
Hosting and email often ride on the same domain but are separate services. Move the domain or its DNS carelessly and email stops without warning, sometimes for days, while nobody realises the messages are simply not arriving. This one is especially painful because it hits a channel you are not watching during a website move.
Broken checkouts and lost orders
On a store, a migration that does not freeze and reconcile orders around the cutover can lose sales placed during the switch or, worse, leave the checkout subtly broken so customers cannot pay at all. Every hour of that is money gone.
Every one of these is preventable, and preventing them is precisely the job. If you have already hit one of these and need a hand, you can get a free quote and we will get the site back on its feet and finish the move properly.
Our Migration Process, Step by Step
A good migration is boring in the best way, because every step is planned and nothing is left to chance. Here is how we move a site, roughly in order. The exact shape flexes with the type of move, but the shape is always the same idea: build and prove the new site in private, then switch to it only when it is verified working.
1. Review and plan
We start by looking at your current site: its size, its host, its plugins, any custom code, whether it is a store, and where you want it to go. From that we map the move, flag anything unusual, and agree a plan and a fixed quote before touching anything. Surprises belong at this stage, not at launch.
2. Full backup
Before any change, we take a complete backup of the existing site, files and database both, so there is always a clean copy to fall back on. A migration should never be the only copy of your site in existence.
3. Build the new site in a staging area
We set up the site in its new home in a private staging environment, invisible to the public and to search engines. Here we move the files and database, update the internal references, reconnect everything, and get the site running exactly as it should on the new platform or host.
4. Test everything
This is where the real value lives. We check the pages, the images, the menus, the forms, the logins, and on a store the whole checkout and payment flow, all on the staging copy while your live site keeps running untouched. Anything that misbehaves gets fixed here, in private, with no visitor ever seeing it.
5. Cut over
Only once the new site is proven do we make the switch, pointing your domain at the new home. Because the copy is fully ready, the change is quick and close to invisible. Visitors move from old to new without a maintenance page or a broken moment.
6. Verify and monitor
After the switch we confirm everything is live and correct on the real domain, set up and check the redirects, make sure the site is open to search engines, and keep an eye on it over the following days to catch anything that only shows up under real traffic.
That final watching stage matters more than people think, and it is one reason ongoing WordPress maintenance pairs so naturally with a migration. A site that has just moved is a good moment to get its updates, backups, and monitoring on a proper footing.
Our Zero Downtime Approach
Downtime during a migration is not inevitable. It happens when someone works on the live site directly, or switches the domain before the new site is ready, so visitors hit a half built or broken page during the gap. Our whole method is built to avoid that, and the idea behind it is simple: never point the public at the new site until the new site is completely finished and tested.
Because we build and prove the new site in a private staging area, your existing site keeps serving visitors the entire time we work. There is no window where the site is down for maintenance, no scramble to fix things while people are watching. When the new copy is verified, the cutover itself is a quick change that routes visitors to the new home, and for most sites it takes minutes with no visible interruption. Someone loading a page during the switch simply gets the site, old or new, never a broken one.
For stores and busy sites we add extra care around the changeover, because those are the sites where even a small gap matters. We plan the timing, and where needed we briefly pause content or order changes right around the switch so nothing placed during the move is lost, then reconcile everything on the new site. You are told about any such freeze in advance and it is kept as short as possible. The result is a move your customers never notice, which is exactly how a migration should feel from the outside: like nothing happened at all, except the site is now faster and in a better home.
Migrating a WooCommerce Store
Moving an online store is the most demanding kind of migration, and it deserves its own section because the stakes are higher and the moving parts are more numerous. A store is not just content, it is a live system taking money, tracking stock, and holding customer records, and all of that has to arrive intact and keep working without a single dropped order.
When we migrate a WooCommerce store, we move the products with their images, descriptions, variations, and prices; the customer accounts and their history; and the orders, so your records and reporting stay complete. We carry across the store configuration, including tax, shipping, and the payment gateway settings, and then we test the full path a customer takes, from browsing to adding to the cart to paying, on the staging copy before anything goes live. A store that looks fine but cannot take a payment is worse than no store at all, so the checkout gets tested hardest of all.
The changeover is handled with particular care. Because orders can arrive at any moment, we plan the cutover to avoid losing sales placed during the switch, coordinating the timing and reconciling orders so nothing falls through the gap. Payment gateways sometimes need their settings confirmed on the new site so live transactions flow correctly, and we verify that as part of go live rather than discovering it from a failed customer payment. If you are also weighing where the store should live, our guide to the best WordPress hosting covers what a store needs from a host, since a busy store puts more demand on its server than a simple site does. You can read more about the platform itself in the official WooCommerce documentation.
Preserving Your SEO and Redirects
For most businesses the search rankings a site has built up are among its most valuable assets, quietly bringing in visitors every day. A migration can protect those rankings completely or damage them badly, and the difference comes down to a few deliberate steps, chief among them redirects. This is one of the strongest reasons to use a professional, because it is easy to get wrong and hard to undo.
The principle is straightforward. Search engines and other websites remember your pages by their web addresses. If those addresses stay the same, as in a same domain host move, there is nothing to preserve and the rankings simply continue. If the addresses change, as in a domain change or a platform move, then every old address needs a redirect pointing to its new equivalent, so that anyone, human or search engine, arriving at the old link is sent smoothly to the right new page. Without those redirects, old links become dead ends, backlinks point at nothing, and rankings fade.
We handle this by mapping the old URLs to the new ones and putting the right redirects in place before and at launch, so no ranking page is ever left stranded. We also make sure the new site is open to search engines rather than accidentally blocked, that page titles and content come across intact, and that the technical signals search engines rely on stay consistent. Done this way, a migration causes at most a brief settle before traffic returns, rather than a lasting loss. If search visibility is central to your business, it is worth pairing the move with a look at your broader WordPress services so the new site launches on the strongest possible footing. For the underlying rules, the WordPress developer resources document how URLs and redirects behave under the hood.
HTTPS and Domain Changes
Two specific parts of a migration cause more than their share of trouble, and both are worth understanding: securing the site with HTTPS and changing the domain name. They often come up together with a move, since a migration is a natural moment to fix them.
HTTPS is the secure, encrypted version of your site's connection, shown by the padlock in the browser. Every site needs it now, not just stores, because browsers mark sites without it as not secure and search engines prefer secure ones. When we migrate a site that is still on the insecure connection, we install the certificate, update the internal links and references that still point at the insecure address, and set up a redirect so anyone arriving at the old insecure link is sent to the secure one. A half done HTTPS setup, where some content still loads insecurely, triggers browser warnings and undermines the whole point, so we make sure the entire site moves across cleanly.
A domain change is the more delicate of the two, because your whole search presence is attached to the old name. Moving to a new domain means redirecting every page from the old domain to its match on the new one, telling search engines the site has permanently moved, updating internal links to the new name, and making sure email tied to the domain keeps working throughout. Handled properly, the rankings and the traffic follow you to the new name over a short settling period. Handled carelessly, a domain change is one of the fastest ways to lose years of search work, which is exactly why it is a job worth handing to people who do it regularly.
How Long a Migration Takes
One of the first questions people ask is how long the move will take, and the honest answer is that it depends on the site, but the ranges are predictable. A small brochure site moving between hosts is often a matter of a day or two from start to verified finish, much of which is testing and waiting for DNS changes to settle rather than active work. There is little to go wrong on a simple same domain move, so it goes quickly.
Larger and more complex moves take longer. A big site with lots of content, many plugins, or custom features needs more building and far more testing, and a platform change, where the site is effectively rebuilt in WordPress, is measured in weeks rather than days because the design and content have to be reconstructed, not just copied. A WooCommerce store sits in between and above, depending on its size, because the extra care around orders, payments, and the checkout adds testing time that is not worth rushing. A domain change adds the redirect mapping and the settling period afterward.
Whatever the size, we give you a realistic timeline as part of the quote, so you know what to expect before you commit. We would rather set an honest expectation and meet it than promise an overnight miracle and cut the testing short, because the testing is what keeps the move safe. If a specific deadline matters to you, tell us up front and we will tell you plainly whether it is comfortable, tight, or unrealistic, and plan accordingly.
What a Migration Costs
Cost is the other first question, and here the honest answer is the same: it depends on the site, and the only accurate figure is a quote for your exact one. A migration's price tracks its complexity, so a small host to host move and a large store migration are simply not the same job. What we can tell you is what drives the cost, so you understand where your site is likely to sit.
The main factors are the size of the site, the type of move, and whether anything unusual is involved. A same domain host move of a modest site is at the light end. A platform change, a domain change, a store, custom code, or a site with a tangle of plugins all add work and testing, and therefore cost. The single biggest lever is the type of move, because rebuilding a site in WordPress from another platform is a different order of effort than copying an existing WordPress site to a new host.
Rather than guess, we look at your actual site and give you a fixed quote before any work starts, so there are no surprises. The review is free and carries no obligation, and even if you decide to do the move yourself afterward, you will come away knowing what it involves. In our experience the cost of a professional migration is small next to the cost of a botched one, whether that shows up as lost orders, lost rankings, or the days you would otherwise spend fixing it. To find out where yours lands, you can get a free quote or look over our pricing approach first. We also handle deeper work through our WordPress development services when a move is really a rebuild.
Migration Readiness Checklist
If you are preparing for a move, whether you hire us or attempt it yourself, this checklist covers the things that matter. Working through it also makes for a smoother, faster, and cheaper migration, because the answers are exactly what we need to plan the job well.
| Item | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Where the site is hosted now | Determines how we access and copy it |
| Where it is going | Sets up the new environment and its requirements |
| Is it a store | Stores need order and payment handling and extra testing |
| Is the domain changing | Domain changes need full redirects and search signals |
| Custom code or special features | These need checking and sometimes rebuilding |
| Current backups | A clean starting backup is a safety net |
| Email on the same domain | Must be protected so mail keeps flowing |
| Existing rankings and key pages | Tells us which URLs must be preserved with redirects |
| Any deadline | Lets us plan a realistic timeline |
You do not need to have all of this figured out before you contact us, since sorting it out is part of what the free review does. But the more you know, the faster we can quote and the smoother the move goes. If you are doing it yourself, treat this list as the plan, and read our detailed walkthroughs on migrating a WordPress website and moving WordPress to a new host before you begin. Moving off an older blogging platform instead? Our Blogger to WordPress migration guide covers that specific path.
How to Get Started
Getting your site moved is meant to be the easy part, and starting takes only a couple of minutes. Reach out and tell us a few things about your site: where it lives now, where you want it to go, whether it is a store, and anything special we should know. That is enough for us to understand the shape of the job.
From there we review your site and come back with a free, fixed price quote and a realistic timeline, with no obligation to go ahead. If you are happy, we schedule the move, back everything up, build and test the new site in private, and switch it over cleanly with no downtime, then keep an eye on it afterward to make sure it settles well. You get a site that works as well as or better than before, in a better home, without losing a night's sleep over it.
Migrations are one of those jobs that feel daunting from the inside and routine from the outside, because we do them constantly and know exactly where the traps are. There is no reason to gamble your site, your store, or your rankings on a move you are not sure about. You can get a free quote and we will tell you honestly what your migration needs, or book a quick call to talk it through first. The review costs nothing, there is no pressure, and it is the first step to having your site exactly where it should be.