WordPress in the cloud: how to migrate a live site without losing customers along the way
A step-by-step guide to moving a WordPress site to new hosting — including how to protect your SEO, how to verify everything works before touching DNS, and what to do if something goes wrong.
Migrating a WordPress site to new hosting scares a lot of business owners — rightly so, since a mistake in the process can take a site down for hours or hurt its Google ranking. With the right order of operations, though, the move can happen without a single customer noticing.
Step one is a full backup: files and database, including a check that the backup can actually be restored. Only move forward once you have a verified backup.
Step two is uploading to a 'staging' site at a temporary address on the new host — so you can verify the site works fully (design, forms, store if there is one) without touching public DNS yet.
Step three is checking performance and SSL on the staging site: load time, a valid certificate, and any redirects that existed on the old site.
Only once everything is green do you move to step four: updating DNS records to point to the new server. DNS changes can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to propagate, so both the old and new sites need to stay available in parallel during the transition.
Finally, once DNS has fully propagated: a last check that every form still sends email, that the sitemap is being served to Google, and that there are no broken links. On Emilion Cloud this whole process is supported directly from the dashboard — including automatic SSL for the new domain, so you're never left without encryption, not even for a moment.