Every day, the pool of WordPress-powered sites on the web is growing. By the way, it makes up more than 35 percent of the total sites on the web. The process of taking those sites from development to production is called migration.
It’s relatively easy to migrate a simple website, for example, a landing page. But it’s a different ball game when migrating a large WordPress site like an e-commerce site.
Without proper guidance, you can run into terrible setbacks. To avoid this, we’ll go through some do’s and don’ts when migrating large WordPress sites.
Importance of Proper Migration
If you are a developer or WordPress development agency planning to migrate your website, you need to know how proper migration can save your job and enhance your development deliverables. Website migrations can easily get messy, especially when it involves a large site. But what if you can mitigate the risks?
Let us look at the importance of proper migration.
Ensures SEO is preserved
SEO is, arguably, of utmost importance when migrating WordPress sites. This isn’t an issue if you’re building the site from scratch. However, if you redesigned the website or made minor changes, you’ll need to properly migrate those changes and redesign without messing up the site’s SEO.
Reduction in Downtime
Proper migration will significantly minimize downtime and possibly eliminate it. Opting for staging in your WordPress development workflow can eliminate disruption to user experience and potential loss of critical data.
Data is Preserved
If you don’t want to lose important site data, you have to make sure you are migrating your WordPress site properly; website data entries such as posts, comments, media files, themes, and plugins.
User Experience
You must ensure proper site migration to avoid disruption to smooth user experience. It is important to note that most users don’t care what goes on behind the scenes, they also don’t want to experience noticeable changes in site performance or availability.
Changes To Site Performance
Imagine a site that runs well and fast for users, and suddenly because of your migration work, that experience has changed. You need to do a proper server configuration and handle resource allocation evenly.
Cost Efficiency
Small site migration should not dent your budget and blow out your plan as a developer or agency to cut costs. However, dynamic sites with many pages, resources, and data can blow your budget over the roof if you are not doing proper migration.
Overview of Common WordPress Migration Challenges
The common challenge of any WordPress site migration is how to do it seamlessly. Particularly with sites that are already live, you want to avoid interrupting users while you migrate their site. Some of this challenges may also include:
How Complex and Dynamic Is the Site?
The overarching challenge of migrating large WordPress sites is knowing how much testing is needed post-migration for themes and plugins you migrated to ensure nothing is broken and they still work perfectly. Now think about sites with extensive custom that may need code editing to ensure compatibility with the new server environment.
Is There Enough Space?
Large sites typically have extensive databases that can be challenging to export, transfer, and import without downtime or loss of critical data. The sheer number of media files (images, videos, documents), content, or pages can significantly increase the time and resources required for migration.
Data Integrity
No customer wants to see their closely kept life history out there on the World Wide Web because the website data that the developer is migrating leaked, corrupted, or got lost. preventing these can be challenging when you are migrating large WordPress sites.
URLs Issues
Another key challenge for migrating large WordPress sites is potential damage to SEO records. Sometimes your website link will just refuse to update.
SSL Certificate Issue
When migrating a large WordPress site, you may temporarily lose your site security certificate. If you don’t take the time to reissue, your site can become vulnerable to attack.
Pre-Migration Preparation
Preparation is key to successfully migrating large WordPress sites. Preparation ensures you have a pre-migration and post-migration checklist; what to do and what not to do. Let us discuss some of them.
Do: Backup Your Site
The first thing to consider is backing up your site. Backup serves as the safety net if your migration goes sideways. InstaWP-powered staging environment aggregate backup process when you create an account and build your site on the platform. The entire copy of your sites is mirrored and accessible any time you want
Don’t: Skip the Backup Step
Not ensuring a proper backup of your site before migrating a large WordPress site can result in potential data loss, extended downtime, and significant disruption to business operations. If something goes wrong during migration, such as a corrupted database or failed transfer, you may permanently lose posts, pages, user information, and media files of your website.
Choosing the Right Tools
Aside from defining the goals of your WordPress site migration, you need the right tools to successfully migrate large WordPress sites. InstaWP staging environment is made for this.
InstaWP has an inbuilt migration function that not only reduces the risks associated with migrating large WordPress sites but also empowers WordPress development agencies to manage large and multisite from a single dashboard.
Do: Use Reliable Migration Plugins
While many hosting services offer backup features, using a reliable plugin for site migration is often more convenient. By researching and selecting a plugin that best fits your current needs, you can avoid potential disasters and ensure a smoother migration process.
Testing the Migration Process
Testing your site is important to ensure that everything functions correctly. You must Verify that all site features (forms, search functionality, e-commerce transactions, etc.) work as expected. With InstaWP, you can view error logs and catch bugs before migrating your site.
Do: Test on a Staging Site
Use InstaWP as your staging environment, where you can either create a WordPress site from scratch or copy a live site that needs updating or editing. With InstaWP, you can test and update your WordPress core, themes, and plugins before applying them to the live site.
Don’t: Test Directly on the Live Site
You don’t want to test directly on the live site because you don’t want to keep the user’s experience flowing.
Database Migration
Along with other website information, your database is how and where your site data is stored and accessed across the site.
Do: Optimize and Clean Your Database
Optimize and clean your database again and again. Permanently delete posts, pages, and comments that are in the trash. Delete old post revisions to free up space. You should also clean data such as post meta, user meta, and term relationships that no longer have a corresponding post, user, or term should be removed.
Don’t: Migrate Unnecessary Data
Make every effort to avoid migrating unnecessary data. Redundant post content and page comments should not make it to the live site. You can seamlessly achieve an optimized and clean database when you use InstaWP to migrate your WordPress site.
Handling Media Files
There are efficient ways of handling media files when migrating large WordPress sites. It is crucial that all images, videos, and other media assets are correctly transferred and accessible on the new site.
Do: Use Efficient Methods for Media Migration
Make sure you have Integrated media file backup into your overall backup strategy, ensuring no files are overlooked. Then organize your media file structure. Clean your media file and optimize it. All these you can achieve when you create a staging with InstaWP. InstaWP migration tool is already pre-built to securely and efficiently migrate your media files.
Don’t: Forget to Check File Permissions
Typically, file permissions should be set to 644 for files and 755 for directories. Also check that the ownership of files is correctly set, usually to the web server user.
Dealing with Large Site Content
Again planning is key to the successful migration of large WordPress sites. However, breaking it down into manageable steps can help ensure a smooth and successful transition.
Do: Break Down Migration into Smaller Parts
Take stock and define your reasons for a site migration. be as diligent and prepared as possible by accounting for the important variables like themes, plugins, and media files. Prepare the tools. Prepare the new (Hosting environment), migrate, and test your migrated sites ensuring everything is working accordingly.
Don’t: Attempt to Migrate All at Once
Migrating all at once rather than incrementally can lead to several risks and challenges, like data loss, downtime, server overload, and many more.
Ensuring SEO and Permalinks Integrity
One of the hardest parts of migrating large WordPress sites is ensuring the integrity of your site’s SEO. Let us consider the dos and don’ts –
Do: Check and Update Permalinks
Make sure all URLs are correctly mapped and functional to maintain SEO rankings. Ensure to check and update URLs on your website, and find broken links, errors, and redirects.
Don’t: Ignore SEO Settings
Ignoring site SEO can be detrimental to the site in the new live environment. This can result in broken links, loss of backlinks, and changes in URL structures, which can negatively impact search rankings.
Post-Migration Checks
Your job is not done even when you have successfully migrated your sites because there is post-migration work that must be done. Let’s discuss what should be done and what not further below.
Do: Thoroughly Test Your Site Post-Migration
Deep testing on your migrated site is important to ensure all content is correctly displayed. Test site functions and features like forms, e-commerce transactions, etc. Check site speed and performance using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.
Don’t: Assume Everything Works Without Testing
Testing is the surest way to know everything works. Then you can confidently say that you have successfully migrated your WordPress site.
Monitoring After Migration
Monitoring your successfully migrated website is how you can continuously manage the site and keep it updated.
Do: Monitor Site Performance and Issues
You must continue to check how your site performs after a successful migration. First, performance and uptime monitoring are essential. Even better if you establish performance benchmarks from before the migration allows you to compare and ensure your site meets expected standards.
Don’t: Neglect Regular Monitoring
If you neglect regular monitoring, you are likely to miss additional errors, plugin updates, and potential vulnerabilities.
Common WordPress Migration Pitfalls to Avoid
If you want to avoid the common WordPress migration pitfalls, you must consider the overall do’s and don’ts of migrating large WordPress sites.
Overlooking Plugin Compatibility
One major pitfall is overlooking plugin compatibility. Plugins are essential for adding functionality to your WordPress site, unfortunately, not all plugins would be compatible with your site. InstaWP staging environment is the right platform or tool for you to migrate your sites. In InstaWP, you will be able to test if plugins are compatible and will not break your site.
Ignoring Theme Dependencies
Because the theme is also an integral part of your WordPress site, you don’t want to ignore the importance of ensuring it is compatible before migration and after migration. Incompatibilities can lead to site errors, broken functionality, and even security vulnerabilities. Testing themes in the InstaWP staging environment can help identify potential issues before they affect your live site.
Conclusion
In conclusion, migrating a large WordPress site requires careful planning, the right tool for WordPress migration, and ongoing monitoring. By incorporating InstaWP staging into your development workflow, following best practices, and avoiding common pitfalls, you can ensure a smooth transition that maintains site integrity, performance, and user experience.