Migrating a website to a new web host can often be a big part of web hosting management, SEO, and even customer service. When you have to switch your CMS, go through a merge or rebranding, or otherwise have to migrate your entire website to a new host, but completing this task correctly and accurately still remains critical. There are so many potential errors that can slip through the cracks, especially if you have hired somebody to do it for you. For this reason you should have a checklist in place of the things you expect to run into when doing this type of work, whether you are the one doing it or you are having it done.

One thing you might want to take care of before doing any of this is testing your website on the one server you plan on using as a replacement. You will need to do this regardless of whether you plan on migrating files, databases, or anything else - you'll just need an avenue of testing to ensure that everything will run smoothly. For example, you may wish to do some tests to see how fast your site loads from the get go, or whether or not it's taking a long time to get responses from visitors. You could also try running a load test over your whole site from one location, to make sure that as much information is getting sent from one location to another as is possible. If you do these kinds of tests, and they all come back with poor results, then you might want to move on to a different option.

Another thing you might want to consider doing before you start any type of migration is uploading your content to a new server. Many times, your content is going to consist of images and videos that require compression. In order to ensure that you don't suffer from data loss, you should upload everything to a new server before you change anything else with your website. This is an especially good idea if you have a lot of information related to your site and it's likely that you'll lose a few backups as well.