Why migrations fail quietly
Most WordPress moves do not fail with a dramatic outage. They fail with mixed content, missing uploads, stale caches, or a form that stopped emailing. Clients notice days later.
At Rayaxis we treat migration as a delivery checklist, not a hosting checkbox.
Before you touch production
- Inventory plugins and PHP version — note anything that needs ionCube, specific PHP extensions, or a paid license key tied to the old domain.
- Confirm SSL and redirects — decide the canonical host (
wwwvs bare) before DNS flips. - Export a content freeze window — tell the client when editors should stop publishing, or plan a final delta sync.
- Back up twice — full files + database on the source, and a restore test on staging.
Staging first, always
Clone to staging on the new host. Run search-replace carefully (serialized data breaks if you do a naive find/replace). Smoke-test:
- Home, key landing pages, blog single, cart/checkout if WooCommerce
- Login, media library, contact forms
- Cron (
wp-cronor real system cron) - Caching plugins and CDN purge path
Cutover sequence we prefer
- Lower DNS TTL a day ahead when possible.
- Final DB + uploads sync from production.
- Point DNS or reverse proxy to the new origin.
- Force HTTPS and fix any leftover absolute URLs.
- Purge all caches (host, plugin, CDN).
- Watch error logs and form deliveries for 24–48 hours.
Post-migration QA (do not skip)
- Google Search Console: coverage + sitemap resubmit
- PageSpeed on mobile for the homepage and one article
- Broken-link crawl of the top 50 URLs
- Email deliverability from contact and WooCommerce templates
When to call for help
Multisite, heavy custom plugins, or a site that still runs an ancient PHP version are where DIY migrators get stuck. We migrate and harden WordPress for clients who need the move done once, correctly.