Moving WordPress to a new host without losing email or rankings

The new host has copied your website across, the test link looks perfect, and somebody changes the domain over on a Friday afternoon. By Monday the site is fine, but the office has had no email since Saturday, and a customer has rung to ask why their quote request bounced. Nothing went wrong with WordPress. The move broke the parts around it that nobody had written down.

Most WordPress moves that go badly fail in the same three places: the domain’s DNS settings, the email records that live alongside them, and the security certificate. Get those in the right order and the website rarely causes much trouble.

Why the website is the easy part

A WordPress site is two things: a folder of files and a database. A competent host can copy both in an hour, and plugins such as Duplicator or All-in-One WP Migration will do it for you on a small site. Once the copy is running on the new server, you can check it page by page before any visitor sees it.

The domain is different. It points the world at your website and at your email, and those two instructions sit in the same place, in a list of DNS records held by whoever manages your domain. When a move changes that list carelessly, the website might arrive safely while the email goes nowhere. Our post on who owns your domain name covers how to find out who can log in to make those changes, and you need that login before you start.

Write down what you have before you touch anything

Before anybody copies a file, make a record of the current setup. This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that saves the move.

The DNS records. Log in wherever your domain is managed and export or screenshot the full list. You are looking for the A record that points at the website, the MX records that tell the world where to deliver your email, and a handful of TXT records with names like SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Those last ones prove to Gmail and Outlook that email from your domain is genuine. Lose them and your messages start landing in customers’ spam folders, which is harder to notice than a bounce.

Where your email lives. This is the question that catches people out. If your email is with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, it is separate from your website and only needs its records carried across untouched. If your mailboxes sit on the old web host, as they often do on cheap cPanel hosting, then closing the old hosting account deletes them, along with years of saved messages. Find out which you have now, while the answer costs a phone call.

Anything else pointing at the domain. Booking systems, newsletter tools and Google’s verification for Search Console often add their own DNS records. If you do not know what a record is for, copy it across anyway.

A full backup, taken by you rather than trusted to the old host, stored somewhere off that server. Our post on what website backups should do explains what a usable one includes.

Build the copy and check it in private

The new host sets up the site on their server and gives you a way to view it before the domain moves, usually a temporary address or an instruction to edit a file on your computer so your browser alone sees the new copy. Use that time well.

Click through the pages your customers use most. Submit the contact form and check the message arrives. Log in to WordPress and look at Settings, Reading: if “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is ticked, as it often is on a copy built for testing, it will tell Google to drop your pages once you go live. Rankings recover from a lot, but a site that asks Google to forget it gets its wish within days.

Keep the addresses of your pages exactly as they are. If /services/boiler-repair/ becomes /boiler-repair/ during the move, Google treats it as a new page with no history. A move is a bad time to tidy up web addresses. Do that separately, with redirects, once the dust has settled.

Switching over with little or no downtime

The trick to a quiet switch is a setting called TTL, short for time to live. It tells the internet how long to remember your DNS records before checking again, and it is often set to a day or more. Two days before the move, ask whoever manages your DNS to drop it to five minutes. When you then make the change, the world notices within minutes instead of over a weekend.

On the day, the order is:

1. Stop changes on the old site. If you take orders or bookings, pick a quiet hour, and ask anybody who edits the site to leave it alone, so nothing new is written to the old copy after the final sync.
2. Do a final copy of the database, so the new site has the last enquiries and orders.
3. Change the website records only. Update the A record, and the www record if there is one, to the new server. Leave the MX and TXT records exactly as they were unless your email is moving too.
4. Get the security certificate issued. The new host can only issue the certificate for https once the domain points at their server, so expect a short gap where the browser complains. A good host has it done within minutes. Our post on expired SSL certificates shows what visitors see if it is missed.

Keep the old hosting running for at least two weeks. Some internet providers remember the old address longer than they should, and a few visitors will reach the old server for a day or two. If something turns up missing from the new copy, the old one is still there to fetch it from.

If your email is moving as well, treat it as a separate job on a separate day. Moving the website and the mailboxes in one go doubles the things that can fail and halves your ability to tell which one did.

What to check the next morning

Give it a night, then work through this list.

• Email both ways. Send a message from your work address to a personal Gmail and back again. Check it arrives, and check it did not land in spam.
• The contact form. Submit it again from the live site. A form that worked on the test copy can fail once the new server sends real mail, which our post on contact forms not sending email goes into.
• The padlock. Load the site with and without www, on http and https. All four should land on the same secure address.
• Google Search Console. Check the Pages report over the following fortnight. A sudden rise in pages marked as not found or excluded points to a changed address or the search engine setting above.
• Speed. Load a few pages on your phone. A move to better hosting should feel quicker. One site we moved went from 4.15 seconds average load to 0.52 seconds. If yours feels slower, ask why before the old account is closed.

Once a fortnight has passed with clean email and steady traffic, cancel the old hosting, and put the TTL back up to an hour or so.

The short version

Write down the DNS records and find out where your email lives before anyone copies a file. Check the copy in private, keep the page addresses the same, and lower the TTL ahead of time. On the day, change the website records and leave the email records alone. Keep the old host for two weeks and test email in both directions the morning after.

If you would rather somebody else did all of that, moving to our Care & Hosting at £49 a month includes the migration free, and recording the DNS and email setup is the first thing we do. You can see everything else we charge for on our prices page.