There can come a point in the development and expansion of your website where you need to migrate it. The reason could be to move it from a shared hosting to a VPS, a dedicated server, or to a new web hosting company altogether. With any website migration, there are risks, especially if a specific set of steps are not followed in order.
These risks include the website no longer functioning properly, missing elements, a loss of data, poor website performance, and it can even cause your website to no longer be indexed by the search engines and therefore lose its rankings. In order to ensure none of the previous risks manifest themselves into reality here are the 10 steps you should follow when migrating your website between hosting companies.
#1: Retain Your Existing Website…For Now: This first one is not actually a step but a definite ‘DO NOT’, which is under no circumstances should you take down your existing website from its current hosting until it is properly migrated and tested as being 100% operational on its new hosting.
#2: Create A Copy Of Your Website: You next need to create a copy of your current website and upload it to your new hosting account. One point here that as you are keeping your current site live, you will initially need to upload the new one to a subdomain as the same domain cannot exist for two separate websites, even if they are identical.