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Finally last week I have decided to migrate the blog to a better server. Actually, I had the idea long time ago but was sort of busy and also afraid of things go wrong. Anyhow, last Saturday simple blog migration started but for some unknown reason I was unable to load the blog and for one week the entire blog was inaccessible. For small blog like mine not having access might not be too critical since the number of people who visit here are few and also the ranking on this blog on Google is not high at all. In nutshell, that means I did not missed much in server migration except my mood due to not being able to find the problem. However, for those who manage high rank website with lots of traffic, one week means disaster for them because first of all cause users would get disappointed and also in SEO of website it has high negative impact at least from Google point of view.
Here are few lessons I learned from small website migration for WordPress bloggers,
- Always keep backup of both database and files in a safe place like Dropbox.
- Careful with database backup. Sometimes the backup file is not complete and might be corrupted. This happens frequently if the host server is not good. Therefore, until the time that you are not sure that everything is working fine don’t wipe off anything even if you should pay little extra money for those extra hours/days.
- If your database user,password, address, and name changed simple edit
wp-config.phpfile. - If you change your blog domain please follow this awesome tutorial by Yoast.
- If some pages throw internal server error, please check your permalink and if necessary change it.
- Updates your plugins.
- If you have cache plugin empty the cache after website migration.
- Setup your email account again.
- Setup you sub domain, park domain, redirect again.
- If you get database connection error for no reason check database access privilege for the user.
- If nothing worked and you got still error that don’t know the reason like what I got, don’t hesitate and better to wipe off everything in new server and setup again because it takes less time and easier than troubleshooting.
- Don’t make server/website migration too long and do it when you are in good mood 😀
