Moving an Ecommerce Site

[Todd RParticipant]

Hey guys, excellent product. I’m using the Migrate tool and it’s been great so far. I do have one very important task that has been really pushing the limits of my skills in regards to WordPress. I have an ecommerce site up and running with 400+ products and can’t afford to take down the site for a day. The site is on an old server with GoDaddy and needs to be moved to a scaled environment. I have this new environment up and running with another install of WordPress. I’m using DomainA as my active ecommerce site (old slower server) and DomainB on the new server. I have successfully exported and imported the site to the new server, however the domain is different. How do I get DomainA to DomainB without losing access to the site and having lots of downtime? The SSL is also a question mark as to what implications I’ll have when the site moves.

Any detailed help/suggestion is MUCH welcomed. Thanks for your time and help in advance and I look forward to the advice.

Thanks,
Todd

[udadminKeymaster]

Hi Todd,

In UpdraftPlus’s expert/debugging tab, there’s a search/replace tool that can be used to change the site URL. Use with care, of course! As well as that, you’d first need to make sure that the hosting is configured to serve the new URL out of that webspace (and not only to serve the current temporary URL). After doing that, you can over-ride the DNS on your computer so that it visits the new hosting, even whilst the official Internet DNS points to the old – to learn about doing that, Google things like “PC edit hosts file” or “Mac edit hosts file”. That then allows you to test. If you’ve got SSL, then you’d need to makes sure that the new site has an appropriate SSL certificate installed for the final URL too. When all is ready, you can change the Internet DNS. You should prepare for a change in the Internet DNS by reducing the zone’s TTL (time-to-live) to a minute or so, a few days in advance – this will tell the Internet not to cache the DNS for too long, thus reducing the problem of people still getting sent to the old hosting whilst caches expire. You may also then need to use a WooCommerce import/export extension in order to make sure your shop data on the destination site is up-to-date, as presumably the source site may have changed in the mean-time (or you could do a fresh database import whilst visiting via the new URL).

If that sounds like a lot to keep on top of, and potentially full of pitfalls, then I’d agree; it is. I’m offering this as general WP advice – obviously, it involves a number of things outside of UD, and your particular hosting may have quirks that would interact with it. So, my best advice would be to hire a pro to manage the process, if you’re nervous about doing any of the steps yourself, as there are a number of subtleties in there.

David

[Author]

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