When preparing for a Migration to a New Host, it’s important to understand the logistics around how this move will impact your visitor’s experience. At Pagely, we take extreme care to minimize the potential for outages that would affect your traffic flow as soon as you subscribe to one of our dedicated VPS plans.
I Just Signed Up With Pagely – What’s Next?
After you’ve signed up and added your team of collaborators, you’ll be partnered with a dedicated on-boarding coach who will help shepherd you through each step towards a successful launch. Our on-boarding process is designed to ensure a smooth, timely, and successful transition to our platform.
Details around requesting a migration will be provided, which you can initiate securely from our migration request form folded inside the Support tab of your Atomic dashboard.
Need help with migrations? We’ll migrate your first three sites for free, and charge just $100 for each additional site. Have a lot of sites? Contact sales for special pricing.
Pre-Migration Checklist
Before we begin the migration process, please review the following checklist to ensure a seamless transition:
- Confirm PHP Version: Ensure that you are currently utilizing PHP 8.1 or higher. If not, we offer PHP 7.4 and 8.0 long term support solutions at an additional cost if needed. Please note that anything below these versions will likely have compatibility issues.
- Review Plugins: Check your plugins against our Banned Plugin List. Any banned plugins will be removed during the migration, which may cause breakage.
- Confirm WordPress Version: Verify that you’re already running the latest version of WordPress. Sites not on the latest version will be updated automatically during the migration.
- Confirm Plugin Updates: Ensure all plugins are up to date. If they are not, they will be updated automatically once the site has been copied to our platform.
- Custom Variables in wp-config.php: Confirm with our team whether you have any custom variables in your wp-config.php file to ensure they’re correctly implemented post-migration.
Will I Be Able to Test My Website First?
Yes.
During this transition, we’ll clone your website to Pagely, giving you the opportunity to test it on a temporary URL (yourname.pressdns.pagely.com) while your site remains live in your present environment. At that point, you have the opportunity to test and verify everything is in working order.
Once you’re ready to cutover, we’ll do a final sync to bring your content current. From there, we’ll ask you coordinate a time with your personal on-boarding czar to have us walk you through the final DNS update necessary to go live. See our article on Scheduling DNS Cutover for more information on this stage.
Do I Need to Worry About Downtime?
No, but there may be a short amount of time (e.g., ~20 minutes) where you need to stop making/allowing content updates on your site, or stop accepting transactions.
Usually we can avoid downtime during this process, although this is primarily contingent upon the nature of your WordPress website.
Basic static WordPress sites:
Static WordPress installs can be migrated without any downtime. In this case, you lower the TTLs on DNS and do a content freeze prior to a final content sync, then we point your DNS CNAME to us for traffic to begin flowing to the Pagely site in production.
Complex WordPress sites:
Complex sites that are transactional in nature, like a WooCommerce store, involve a small maintenance outage (~20 minutes) in order to ensure data integrity while cutting over.
Note: It is wise to set up a maintenance page during the migration until everything is running properly on our end. There are a variety of options to choose from in the WordPress repository to display a maintenance page. The Coming Soon Plugin by SeedProd is a popular choice we see used frequently.
Planning Final Cutover
We coordinate a pre-determined time slot as a safety precaution at a time most convenient for your visitor traffic. Generally, we can complete a website migration within one-two days of filing a request. Our engineers will notify you via a support ticket once your site has been transferred over and is ready to rock!