One of the benefits of building your website on the massively popular WordPress open-source platform is that you are not locked in to any particular service provider, and can work with almost any Web professional worldwide. You can reasonably easily move your website to the web hosting service we manage, and it is also possible to move away. Moving a website between hosts is known as ‘migration’.

Who Is Responsible For Moving My Website

When clients engage us to take over management of their existing web presence, one of the services we naturally provide is an inbound website migration. That is to say, we take care of moving their current website to our hosting, where applicable, since we are the people that are being paid to manage the website going forward.

Similarly, when clients wish to move away and engage an alternate web professional who uses a different web hosting service, the responsibility is on the new vendor to perform the outbound migration.

If there is no new web professional available to manage the outbound migration, it will be wise to choose a web host who is willing to handle the migration, which many do. This may or may not be a free service.

If you wish to handle the migration yourself, you may find the following info helpful.

How To Move A Website

When a web host or web professional moves a WordPress site, they often use migration software in the form of a WordPress plugin which is installed on your existing website, such as these:

* BlogVault in particular is the service many top web hosts use for inbound migration. In fact, they provide the service our default web host (Cloudways) uses to underpin their Cloudways Migrator WordPress plugin. Other hosts such as Bluehost and SiteGround do the same.

NOTE: Sometimes we are asked to “pack up a website” or “send a file” that a client can download in order to move their website to a new host. This legacy approach remains in popular awareness due to the number of web hosts using a common management platform (typically “cPanel”). Depending on your web host, this may still be a viable migration option. However, many modern web hosts don’t provide a “file” you can export or download, nor would such a file be compatible with any random web host you might choose to move to.

Other Considerations

Remember that migrating a website is not the only step involved in moving a domain from one place to another. You or your web professional should ensure that these things are considered:

  • Domain Name: access to your domain’s registrar is necessary in order to complete any migration
  • DNS / Nameservers: this is managed at your registrar and/or web host
  • Email Service: should either continue unchanged, or be migrated when applicable
  • Contact Forms: these generate data that you may want to retain when moving your site. They also should be tested after migration

When we migrate our clients’ web presence, we employ a long checklist to help ensure many other things are taken care of.

For these reasons among others, it is important to understand that moving a website from one place to another is not always a free service. A web professional whose service you are leaving should generally not be expected to perform all the work involved nor bear full responsibility for moving you to an alternate service.