Migrating or moving a website used to be a painful, and time intensive process. It often involved downtime, weeks of planning and multiple team members.
Thankfully for WordPress website owners those days are long gone. With the advent of migration plugins and migration services, moving a WordPress website can be done in a matter of minutes not days.
Moving to Pressable
We recently established a new account with Pressable for the purpose of transferring one of our existing websites. We have plans to move many more, and wanted to document and time the process.
Pressable has a helpful document on migrating, which outlines the steps and tools available.
Pressable has both assisted (where they do the work for you) and unassisted (using a plugin) migration options.
Migration Process (unassisted)
- Sign up at Pressable.
- Create new (blank) site at Pressable.
- Disconnect live/existing site from Jetpack
- Navigate to Migrate Site in the My Pressable Dashboard.
- Download the migration plugin and install on the live site.
- Enter your email (for notifications) and the Pressable (SFTP) connection details into the migration plugin settings.
- Clear the Pressable server cache and any other theme or plugin caches.
- Add the domain at Pressable in the dashboard.
- Point the domain DNS records to Pressable.
You can also “Request an assisted migration from Pressable’s Customer Success Team.” I’m assuming that involves the same basic steps, just a lot more hand holding which makes sense for non-tech business owners.
Migration Time
Overall the migration process for this simple (under 10 plugins) and small WordPress website was less than 20 minutes. This is impressive, and only made possible with the Pressable toolset and having easy access to the DNS records.