It is always important to ask how people would approach a given task beforehand to find more abut their process.
Our process is this:
We try to gather as much information about the site as possible.
This is very important because change affects things. This applies to business and personal matter.
For this reason it’s good to share lots of details with us so we can prepare for them and make sure your existing integrations continue to work.
Depending on site’s site we may try using migration plugins to package the site. Some hosting companies have strict policy on resource consumption or external program execution in such cases the backup plugins usually fail.
We access the site via SFTP/SSH and then try to export the database and package it along with site files excluding any existing backup files.
We then connect to the target server and download the packaged site from there.
Servers have pretty good connectivity and the site transfer is pretty quick. We do send a download link to the client so they have a backup of the existing site just in case.
Downloading the site locally can take lots of time and also uploading it too.
After the site’s files have been transferred to the new server we start importing the database an replacing any links.
We have ways to access the new site even before the DNS changes have been propagated (this involves adding an entry in the hosts files).
We advise clients to keep their existing hosting plan for 1-2 weeks after the WordPress migration because sometimes the new hosting or its software may not be fully compatible with your site’s requirements.
When all is good we switch the DNS records of the site to point it to the new location.
Then it would be time to pour a glass of whiskey to congratulate ourselves for job well done.