In this article, we will look at the current WordPress Migration systems and their states. We will also discuss Migrate Guru, a possible solution that may prove to be the migration overhaul mechanism so desperately required.
Guest Author: Akshat Choudhary
Akshat Choudhary is the founder and CEO of BlogVault, MigrateGuru & MalCare, and has been building systems and products since 2005.
WordPress Migration Trends
Every serious WordPress user will always need WordPress Migration, but the current system of migrating web host for your websites is intricately complex. Even with a large number of tutorials and guidebooks that cover WordPress migration almost everyone in the online community still finds this task pretty daunting. In addition, the cost involved in this process amounts to quite a substantial sum.
In the Age of Technology we live in right now it is not a lot to expect that technical requirements will be fulfilled intuitively in order to enhance the user experience. The software and hardware required should be minimalistic i.e. the user should expend as little effort as possible.
The intuitive nature and minimalist philosophy are not fully implemented at WordPress despite the company belonging to the 21st-century being only 14 years old. Host migration is still done manually. This involves non-automatic hand-operated work requiring a lot of multitasking. This means that the user is not only responsible for content creation but they are also supposed to handle content transfer and migration.
Manual transfers involving selling your old place of residence, locating a new house, moving all your stuff, updating your addresses and so on are stressful enough but to also have to experience the same with website migration is just harrowing. In the virtual world the focus should be how to move to your new address’ with all your stuff intact and as cheaply as possible.
WordPress Migration is Really Important
A WordPress site can go through a number of migrations during its lifecycle. These may include the following scenarios:
After the user creates a website in a development environment, it is then moved to its production host. In order to test a change on the website, the user has to migrate it from production host to development and then back to production. If an associated website URL changes the user then has to migrate the website URL.
There are a lot of reasons a user changes hosts. Some include slow site, unsure backup, limited bandwidth, poor security, inadequate customer support, increased downtime or the most common you are just looking for more space. Migration of websites should be done once you have confirmed your back-up.
The State of the Existing Migration Systems
The current methods of WordPress migration require manual work and a lot of time. Website migration is inherently hard and complicated. A wrong method in even the least process can cause major losses.
There are five key factors that are the basis of a WordPress Migration System:
1. Ease of Use
The internet and technology have brought almost everything just a click away, shopping for shoes, learning, paying bills, interacting, and meeting new people can happen almost instantaneously.
There is already a renewed effort within WordPress as seen with Project Gutenberg to make it easier to use. WordPress migration should then be the next step. As it is currently it is too complicated for most people especially people without extensive technical skills to use.
In order to manually migrate your website, the user has to create back-ups, change the configurations, use FTP clients to copy files, and then use PHPMyAdmin to import the data. This is evidently a lengthy process and it may take more than 72 hours depending on the size of your website. That is a lot of time not spent developing content for your website.
2. Hundreds of Ways to Fail
There are numerous pitfalls in the migration process. It is difficult to back up large sites and you may have noticed how often copying using FTP fails especially on unreliable home networks. Not to mention the errors that occur as a result of incompatibility between web hosts.
These tools are not intelligent enough to resolve any issue automatically so they just stop. Then there are just so many confusing steps that even if the user tries to follow them as closely as possible there is always a huge possibility that the results will be disastrous. The process again is inflexible and there is little room to deviate from them making this whole process exhausting and frustrating unlike other technical processes these days.
3. Low Speed
This is probably the most annoying in this day and age where everything should be done quickly. Nobody wants to wait for days for a website to be migrated. The more difficult the process the more time consuming it will be. An error by the user means the disruption of the whole process and debugging the specific issues is time-consuming work.
Time-consuming things usually get procrastinated which is even worse. The process of WordPress migration is like the construction of a house of cards, even if you have the technical know-how to do it, speeding up the procedure only enhances the probability of failure.
The process that already takes up to 72 hours can become even more annoying when your hosting account is suspended and the last thing you need is your site going down.
4. No One Wins
This is an example of those situations where both the user and the web host lose out. How? When the source site becomes overloaded the process of backing up weighs on the WordPress site. Now errors are encountered by the user/customer and the destination web host has to carve out the already limited amounted of time to try and troubleshoot all the errors they encounter. The user suffers ultimately though because they did not sign up to deal with all these complications and simply want a functional website.
5. Accuracy
The amount of manual work required increases the chances of human errors.
White Glove Services can be Expensive
Most hosts and agencies have experts who handle migrations for the customers but is often expensive and has a long waiting period. The user will also have to share critical information and credentials like FTP and WordPress Admin for the new host.
Use Migrate Guru for WordPress Migrations
Migrate Guru eliminates a huge chunk of the manual steps required during WordPress migration. It does this by copying the site to be migrated onto its external servers and uses the resources on these servers to move the site. This eliminates all the errors and puts WordPress migration just one click away which was the dream.
Download the free plugin from the WordPress Plugin Repository and get started today with Migrate Guru!
