4 critical mistakes made when migrating your website

Posted October 28, 2019 by Lee

There are many reasons why you might relocate your website. You might have a better deal from a new provider, or you might require an upgrade due to space or server issues. Whatever the case may be, it can feel like a complicated process if you are inexperienced at this type of task – which makes mistakes easy to make. Here are four mistakes you do not want to make, as they may end up destroying your website as you know it.

Not backing up your files first

Whether you work on your website by uploading files to the backend, or you are more hands-off with a template website approach, it’s always possible to create a backup of your website. A backup is a file which preserves all of your uploads, your page content, and even the way that your website looks and works.

The backup can be created at any time. There are some website plugins out there, especially for popular template services like WordPress, which will allow you to do it very quickly. You just set them to back everything up regularly, and make sure that nothing has been added to the site or changed since the last time.

You can also back up your files manually, right before you migrate. Either way, this means you have another copy of everything on your site – so if it crashes horribly and you lose everything, you can upload it all again instead of having to start over.

Migrating at a critical time

Migrating can cause your site to be down for a certain amount of time. There are ways you can reduce this time, but there is always a good chance that your site could be down for as much as 24 hours. Especially if something goes wrong during the process, this could mean significant outage.

What you don’t want to do is to plan a migration right before a product release, or after a marketing piece about your website goes viral. Unless your site is already down because it couldn’t handle the traffic loads, you don’t want to waste leads and lose customers by planning poorly.

Diving in without planning

You will also want to look through instructions for migrating carefully, especially if you have never done it before. Make sure that you have all of the information on hand that you are going to need and that you have paid for your new hosting ahead of time. This will ensure everything goes as smoothly as possible.

If you dive straight in on step one without looking ahead, you could quickly end up in trouble and realising you don’t know how to take the next step – leaving your website down indefinitely.

Not asking for help when you need it

Not everyone is a web expert, and that’s perfectly fine. If you do run into any problems when migrating your website – or if you don’t know where to start – there will be someone available to help you.

Reach out to the tech support team at your new host, and ask for their assistance. They will be only too happy to walk you through everything. Don’t worry – they have heard all of the stupid questions under the sun, and won’t think any less of you for needing help. This way, you will avoid costly mistakes which might leave you starting from scratch.

Above all things, make sure that your website is protected during migration. A backup stored on your computer is the essential thing on our list!

Categories: Web Hosting