You may have been asking yourself how much does it cost to migrate a WordPress site?
The answer, as always, is that it depends on several factors and how urgently you want this done.
- WordPress Migration Questions
- Planning the WordPress Migration
- Opportunity cost
- Migration
What is a WordPress Site Migration?
This is a process of copying one WordPress to another web hosting or under a different account. This involves collecting and packaging all the content, media, and code, plugins, themes, database and making it ready for the migration.
WordPress Migration Questions
Are you migrating from Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, Magento, Joomla, Drupal or from another Content Management System to WordPress?
Is the goal to transfer from one server to another without changing the domain name?
Are you changing the domain name?
Are you redesigning the site in the meantime?
Are there any link structure changes? Does you need have up 301/permanent redirects?
Is this WordPress Multisite installation? If yes, are you moving some subsites or the whole WordPress Multisite network
Are you going to be migrating emails and other services as well?
Are you migrating the site fully i.e. overriding the target location or partially just some content?
How soon do you want the migration to happen? Today, a week from now?
Is this migration from a shared WordPress hosting to a VPS or a dedicated server?
If it’s a new domain you will need to set up redirects
There are lots of questions to address. It’s better to do only one thing at a time, assess what went well and what to do differently.
Planning the WordPress Migration
Somebody once said plans are worthless, but planning is essential (–? Eisenhower ?)
Well, I partially agree with that but plans are still valuable. Because they will focus everybody on the team toward the same goal. During that planning process you decide what’s important and the sequence things need to be. During this phase it’s good to take into account file size, database size.
The less complicated the set up is the fewer issues have to be dealt with.
Migration plugins can work for some of the sites but they can’t be relied on 100% of the time because of server limits and restrictions. A professional WordPress migration service can help lower the risks that may arise with complex set ups.
If the WordPress site is about to be move to a VPS or a dedicated server you or the person who is doing the migration has to ensure that all php extensions have been installed. Usually, with shared hosting it has lots of extensions activated and installed because they serve a larger audience.
Opportunity Cost
Would you lose money for every hour your site is down?
Also you need to take into account the time that you have to take from your daily activities to plan the migration.
Migration
Depending on the size of the WordPress site, database & goals it can take from several hours to a week to complete the migration.
Some inexperienced people may attempt to download the files locally first and then upload them to the new location.
Old Server => Local Computer => New Server
More experienced WordPress Migration professionals will upload the site directly to the target server from the old server.
Old Server => New Server
Also some WordPress hosting companies put lots of security restrictions and that can slow down the migration process.
Image credit: Howie Mapson @howiehowei – on Unsplash
So how much does it cost to migrate a WordPress site?
It has to be approached case by case basis but generally it should start at around $150-$500+ USD and up depending on how complex the WordPress site is.