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Imagine yourself leisurely walking into a hotel, booking, hurrying to your room. Your luggage arrives, and before you get to take it from the bellhop’s hand, he pulls out a POS device and starts to print your receipt for carrying it. And because nobody would actually enjoy such a thoroughly charged welcome to a new host, we’d like to share a few thoughts on why we believe in free migrations.
Let’s first delve into the details of a migration of WordPress site from another host to Presslabs. All of this usually begins when a customer tells us about his intention to switch hosts. We ask him about all the facets of his blog and suggest a plan to best match the audience he’s aiming for. After we take the wheel from the current host, the actual migration process can commence.
#1. Seamless transition
Publishing is a very demanding field. Websites need to be up and running without disruption. Every outage that a popular blog has will cut its revenue and maybe even cause some of its readers to cut ties with it. This is why, when migrating, you want to make sure that absolutely everything runs as it should and that no faults remain from the process that can be seen by the public.
We make sure that every single customer that moves his website with us has not one second of outage during the migration process. We also double-check the website’s performance before we make the final switch and start serving pages.
#2. Data handling and integrity
Making sure that all files are transferred is very important, and we consider that hosting is in a way a bank’s vault, only that here we’re storing your work, which is why making sure all files have made it safely to the destination is very important to us.
#3. Replacement of hazardous plugins
WordPress is a great tool for people who want to concentrate on content and not on coding. This commodity is in no small part brought to you in the form of already-made plugins that help you customize your website to the minutest of details. And as exciting as these little bits of functionality can be, they’re not always what you’re looking for. A lot of times you may be looking for a nice pair of tweezers, and all you’re going to get is a Swiss Army knife with a particularly small pair.
This is exactly why we filter the list of plugins before we go any further with the migration process by eliminating the ones that can be found on our blacklist. Some plugins severely reduce performance, others are not well-suited for the task, and some are simply incompatible with our infrastructure. For most these we offer alternatives, some of which are home-baked.
#4. Removal of performance hogs
It may be in your theme or it may be in a plugin. It may be coded by one of your developers or it may be written by a programmer working from the other side of the planet. No matter where it is or who is to blame, any performance hog from the website should be noticed by our engineers, and if it does slip away from their watchful eyes, it will be sniffed out by our continuously monitored platform.
With all the data carefully transferred, performance issues fixed, theme and plugins streamlined, the website is ready to go live on our servers.
Back to our main point, another reason why we provide and endorse free migrations is to be able to offer free trials. We value honesty and backing up our claims, which is exactly what we want to achieve here. Customers have the right to get a feel for what our service is like, and we are excited to let them do so.
Free trials are great to have, and they do prove a point, but even if we left this aside for a moment, the idea of free migrations would still hold. Whenever you have guests, you make sure they get a warm welcome when they arrive. This is our way of doing just that. It’s our friendly handshake at the start of a lasting business partnership.
