Cutover work · Intermediate · 1–2 hours, or one ticket to the desk
How to migrate a WordPress site — A Migration Is a DNS Cutover With a File Copy Attached
Nobody has ever lost a migration because the files copied badly. They lose it at the moment the record changes, or because a record they never meant to touch changed with it.
The short answer
Treat the move as two separate jobs and never do them in the same week: copying the site onto a new server, which nobody outside can see, and changing the record that sends visitors there, which everybody can. Lower the TTL the day before, verify the rebuild through your own hosts file, then change the A record and nothing else.
The two failures worth planning around are both about records. Mail disappears when a zone is rebuilt from memory at the new host and the MX record comes back pointing at the wrong place. And a name becomes unmovable for sixty days if you transfer the registration at the same time as the hosting, because a registrar transfer starts a lock that nothing will lift early.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
Intermediate
Assumed knowledge
5
Steps, first to last
Free
Cost of asking
Proven
Checked where you will do it
Written for the person holding the domain. Whatever tool copies the files — a plugin, a manual export, or our engineers — the sequence around the cutover is the same, and the sequence is the part that decides whether anybody notices.
Everything before the record change is invisible to the outside world and completely reversible. The record change itself is one field, and the old server keeps answering until caches expire.
Two clocks are running, and only one is yours
The first clock is the TTL on your records, which you set, and which decides how long resolvers keep serving the old answer after you change it. The second is the registry clock: the sixty-day lock that follows a registrar transfer or a registrant change, during which the name cannot be moved again by anybody, including you.
So do not move registrar and host in the same week. Move the hosting, confirm it, and let the registration follow a month later if it needs to at all. The registration and the hosting have no technical relationship — a name registered anywhere can point at a server anywhere.
Copy the zone before you copy a single file
Open the zone at whichever provider the delegation points to and write down every record: A, AAAA, CNAME, MX with priorities, and the TXT records carrying SPF, DKIM and any verification strings you have collected over the years. Those verification records are the ones people rebuild from nothing three weeks later, having lost access to a Search Console property or a payment provider.
You will be rebuilding this zone at the other end if you also change DNS provider. Having it written down turns that from an act of recall into an act of typing.
Drop the TTL a day early
The day before the move, take the TTL on the A record from whatever it is — four hours is common — down to five minutes. Wait out the old TTL so that resolvers pick up the short one. This is the whole trick, and it converts a cutover from an afternoon of mixed results into a couple of minutes of overlap.
Put it back up once the move has settled. A five-minute TTL left on for ever is a lot of unnecessary lookups, and there is no benefit once the address has stopped changing.
Rebuild, then verify without touching the record
Upload the files, create the database, import the dump, and set the new database name, user and password in wp-config.php. The site now exists at the new address and nobody outside knows it.
Then add one line to your own computer's hosts file, so that this machine and no other resolves the real domain to the new server's address. You are now looking at the finished site, on its real name, while every visitor in the world is still being served perfectly well by the old host. Click through all of it before you go anywhere near the zone.
Change the A record. Leave MX alone. The cutover is one field: the A record for the apex, and the same for www if it is an A record rather than a CNAME. That is it. If your mail is staying where it is, the MX record must not move with the site, and neither must the SPF record naming the sending host.
This is where most stranded-email incidents start. Somebody changes nameservers rather than a single record, the new host generates a fresh default zone with its own MX pointing at itself, and mail that used to go to a third-party provider now goes to an empty mailbox on a server nobody checks. Nothing bounces. It is simply gone, quietly, until a customer telephones.
The week afterwards. Leave the old hosting running for a few days as insurance, and confirm a certificate has issued for the name at its new home before you consider the job closed — the free certificate here appears as soon as the name resolves to the account, and not one minute before.
Then put the TTL back up, send one message in and one message out to prove mail survived, and delete any records at the old provider that are no longer serving a purpose. A zone left half-migrated is the thing that confuses the next person, who may well be you.
Why this job has fewer moving parts here
The registrar record, the zone editor and cPanel all sit behind one login here, so nothing in these instructions asks you to work out which supplier holds which setting — the commonest reason a five-minute change costs an afternoon.
NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching sit beneath every tier, the smallest one included. That is the floor here rather than an upgrade path.
- Written against the panel you log in to
- The failure mode flagged before you meet it
- The way back printed beside the change
- Support that answers the domain questions too
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
The cutover treated as the job
File copying is well covered everywhere. What decides a migration is the record change, the TTL before it and the MX record you must not touch.
The sixty-day trap named
Move the registrar in the same week and the name is locked for sixty days. Knowing that beforehand costs nothing; discovering it afterwards costs two months of flexibility.
Zero downtime, properly explained
Both servers answer at once while caches expire. Nobody meets a gap, provided the record moves after the rebuild is verified rather than before.
Honest about the size of it
Intermediate level, one to two hours, or one ticket to the desk and none of your afternoon.
The silent failure prevented
Stranded mail makes no noise. This sequence keeps MX and SPF out of the change entirely, which is the only reliable defence.
A desk that keeps your hours
Cutovers happen late. Someone answers late, and can look at the zone from their side while you look at yours.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Hand the whole job over, or read on
Open a ticket with the login for your current host and we bring the lot across — files, databases, mailboxes — usually inside a day, checked before anything goes live. Everything below is the do-it-yourself route.
- 2
Write the zone down, then drop the TTL
Copy every record out of the live zone, including MX priorities and every TXT verification string. Then take the A record's TTL to five minutes and wait out the old value before you do anything else.
- 3
Rebuild at the far end
Files up, database created, SQL imported, wp-config.php pointed at the new database. Nothing here is visible from the outside and nothing here can be seen by a visitor.
- 4
Verify through your own hosts file
Add a line mapping the real domain to the new server's IP address on your own machine. You see the finished site on its real name; the rest of the world carries on being served by the old host. Click everything.
- 5
Change the A record, then watch the certificate
One field. Not the nameservers, not the MX, not the SPF record. Then check that a certificate has issued for the name here, send a test message in each direction, and put the TTL back up.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Staging copies, so a change is rehearsed before the live name serves it
- A daily copy, with the restore in your hands rather than in a queue
- Webmail in the browser, with IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client
- A free certificate on every plan, reissued before the old one expires
- A renewal figure identical to the one you registered at, year after year
- Softaculous included for one-click installs
- Thirty days to change your mind on hosting, seven on reseller
- A staffed support desk every hour of every day
- WordPress Toolkit, with the updating seen to for you
- WebP image conversion built in at no extra charge
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
Does changing hosts move the domain registration as well?
No, and it is worth being firm about this. The registration lives at the registrar and the site lives at a host, and the only link between them is a record you control. You can move hosting a dozen times and never touch the registrar. Combining the two jobs is what turns a simple afternoon into a sixty-day lock.
Does the MX record have to change when the site moves?
Only if the mailboxes are moving too. If mail is staying with its current provider, MX stays exactly as it is and so does the SPF record. The danger is changing nameservers rather than a single record, because the new provider generates a default zone with its own mail settings and quietly replaces yours.
Can the site come across without the name moving at all?
Yes, and the two jobs are separate on purpose. Send the desk the login for your current host and the files, databases and mailboxes come over at no charge, usually inside a day; the name can stay where it is registered and simply point here. Moving the registration is a decision for another week.
How long before the rest of the world sees a change?
That is your TTL, not our timetable. A record cached at four hours can go on being served for four hours after you edit it; drop the TTL to five minutes the day before and the same change lands in minutes. The wait is a number you set in advance rather than a queue you are stuck in.
Keep reading
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A straightforward running order for a migration your visitors never spot: which files travel first, how to bring the mail across without dropping a single message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two errors that sit behind almost every outage we get called in to fix.
Move the site. Leave the name where it is.
Free migration by our engineers, and a zone editor you can read before you change anything.
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