Moving a Site Off SiteDistrict

When to move a site, and how to do it

In some cases, you might want to move a site off SITEDISTRICT. This page covers the reasons to do so, and the technical details of a site migration.

Reasons To Move

There are various reasons why you might move a WordPress site off of SiteDistrict.

If you no longer need a site, or just don't want to pay for it any longer, you might also be interested in our page about Taking a Site Offline.

Switching Platforms

In some cases, you may not be moving the existing WordPress site as-is, but rather switcing to a different platform or website builder, such as SquareSpace, Wix, Shopify, or something similar.

WordPress is not always the best choice for a website. Typically the biggest reason why WordPress or another platform succeeds or fails, is based on the comfort and expertise of those who are left to use, update, maintain, and develop the site.

Most often we see people move away from WordPress because their developer built the site in WordPress, because it was best for them, but it wasn't necessarily the best platform for the site owner, or those with the responsibility for handlig the website in the longer term.

New Developer / Agency

Probably the second most common reason that sites are moved off of SITEDISTRICT is that a new developer or agency is "taking over" the site in some way, and for some reason thinks it is a good idea to move the site to a different WordPress host.

However, unlike switching to a different platform altogether, moving a WordPress site off of SITEDISTRICT is rarely a good idea, and usually done out of ignorance. In some cases, it's also done out of laziness, or even greed. You should also make sure you're not dealing with a bad developer.

Pretty much any developer with significant experience & expertise with WordPress hosting, including experience with SITEDISTRICT, picks SiteDistrict because of our performance, security, site management tools, reliability, and support. It's typically those that lack experience with our platform that decide to move a site.

Unfortunately, if the previous developer did not properly or fully educate the site owner about the reasons for hosting on SITEDISTRICT, a site owner may listen to their new developer, because they can't tell the difference themselves, and might not realize their developer is actually not as much of an expert in WordPress hosting as they could be ...

Some of the reasons an agency or developer might want to move a site:

• Using What They KnowSome developers or agencies prefer to use the same hosting provider or platform for all their sites, because they are familiar with the dashboard, the tools & workflow, support processes, and even the quirks & negative aspects, for which they might know the workarounds. It's not that their chosen paltform is better, it just lets them be lazy and not learn something new. But as most happy SITEDISTRICT users have said, "I had no idea!", when they discovered how much better hosting could be by hosting with SITEDISTRICT.
• Everything in One PlaceVery similar to the previous reason, and often overlapping with it, it can be easier for some developers or agencies to put all their sites in one place, on one provider, and under one login. It's just convenient.
• Desire for ControlLike other "managed" WordPress hosts, SITEDISTRICT is custom built to host WordPress sites in a certain way. In fact, it's hard to beat a properly optimized and customized WordPress hosting platform, and we are not the only ones that fit this description. However, some developers think they should be able to do things "their way", and prefer somewhere that gives them a bit more control. Be careful though: you might end up paying someone to do a lot more work maintaining the hosting than you expected, if this is the case.
• Reselling HostingSome developers or agencies actually resell cheaper hosting in order to make some monthly recurring revenue. While this can also be done on SiteDistrict, some places can make higher margins by using cheaper hosting, or their existing account with a different provider, which likely benefits from a discount from hosting multiple sites.
• Unfamiliar with Site TransfersMany agencies are unfamiliar with how easy it is to Transfer a Site to a different account on SITEDISTRICT. They think that when they "take over" a site, they have to move it. And if they move it, they might as well move it to a hosting provider they are familiar with ... However, it's actually easiest to just get a new account set up and move the site over. Fast, relatively easy, and zero downtime. Plus, you retain all the benefits of hosting on SITEDISTRICT.

Site Not Needed

In some cases, you may not actually be "moving" a site, but rather you've decided that it's no longer necessary, and just want to take it offline. If this is the case, see our page about Taking a Site Offline for more information and guidance.

Reasons to Stay

There are generally more and better reasons to stay, and keep hosting your WordPress site on SITEDISTRICT, than there are reasons to move it.

Performance

Website performance is important, and ensuring excellent WordPress performance is not something that is done easily, nor necessarily comes cheap. At SITEDISTRICT, we specialize in WordPress performance, and most sites are noticeably faster for both visitors as well as site administrators, compared to most other WordPress hosting providers.

If you value your own time, want a snappy dashboard for those managing the site from the WordPress admin interface, and want the best experience for your site visitors, one of the best things you can do is keep your site hosted on SiteDistrict.

Most sites that are moved off of SITEDISTRICT become 2-4 times slower when moved to a new host. We know this because our uptime monitoring tracks the site performance before and after a move.

Security

Security is another one of our specialties at SITEDISTRICT. Most sites do not run any security or firewall plugins, and in fact, we have started blocking most of these plugins, because they cause more problems than they solve. We already provide an advanced and high performance WordPress firewall as part of our platform.

Unlike site performance, you may not notice a difference right away. It may take a few days, weeks, or even months until you have a incident that could have been prevented if you had not left SiteDistrict.

Maybe you'll spend additional time installing & configuring WordPress security plugins after you move the site, even though you would not have needed to bother if you left the site on SITEDISTRICT.

Spam submissions to forms are probably the first and most likely issue you'll notice. If you allow users to comment on blog posts, you'll likely see spam start to show up there too. Intermittent performance issues can often be traced back to unblocked attacks on sites. One of the worst things that could happen is that your site is completely hacked, most likely due to a vulnerable plugin, which was easily exploited because the advanced firewall protection on SITEDISTRICT was no longer in place to protect the site.

Support

Our customers rave about our support. Matt, our founder, provides most of the support, which means that you get to interact with both a WordPress and hosting expert, as well as the person that can actually fix issues and add new features to the SITEDISTRICT platform, when it makes sense.

In most cases, when you contact support, you want an actual person to respond to you the first time you contact them, you don't want to have to wait for your issue to be escalated and bounced around, you don't want to repeat yourself to multiple people or even the same person, you don't want a knee-jerk response blaming something or someone else, and you want your issue to be figured out and ideally solved in a timely manner. If you're not consistently getting this kind of support at your new host, you might want to look elsewhere.

Reliability / Problem Free

At SITEDISTRICT, one of the things we obsess about is preventing what are often common issues at other hosts. By keeping your site up & running smoothly, with consistently good performance, we keep both our customers and their site users and visitors happy. We also make our job simpler, because we don't need to handle additional support requests.

We have internal monitoring & alerting systems for both sites and our servers, and we'll often know if there is an issue on a site before the site owner. If it's a platform or server issue - which are themselves quite rare - we'll usually be addressing it by the time customers notice or contact us, if they even notice at all.

In addition, we automate many things that you might need to do manually at other hosts, and ensure that everything works seemlessly on both your live and staging sites, including HTTPS, URL updates, cache purges, and more.

Tools & Features

The SITEDISTRICT dashboard is full of useful tools and features that make it easier to manage a WordPress site than just about anywhere. Fast and powerful backups, flexible and speedy staging sites, unparalleled logs and analytics, and far more. Yes, other providers may have some version of these features too, but they are often crippled and slow in comparison. If you value your time, it's hard to beat the SITEDISTRICT platform, when it comes to building, running, and maintaining WordPress sites.

Moving a Site

If for some reason you still choose to move your WordPress site, or you are unable to convince the site owner / developer / marketing person / etc. to keep the site hosted on SiteDistrict, then you'll need to take a few steps to migrate to your site to a new provider.

Migration Steps

The steps for moving a WordPress site from one platform to another are common, no matter which host you move from or to. They are:

1. Set up New Hosting Account
2. Copy the Site
3. Update DNS

Set up a New Hosting Account

Unless you already have a hosting account with your new hosting provider, you'll need to set up an account. Some providers let you sign up for free, others require either a credit card or a payment.

Tip: Ensure that you have a money-back guarantee period, in case you find your new hosting isn't cutting it, and either want to move back to SiteDistrict, or to a different host. If you can select a month-to-month payment option, that's even better, as you won't feel "locked in", and the provider should be more motivated to provide good service, month-after-month.

Copy the Site

The next step in a site migration is to copy the site to the new hosting platform. With WordPress, this means copying the files (WordPress core, theme, plugins, and meida/uploads) and the MySQL database.

There are multiple ways to accomplish this. Which one is best depends on the new hosting choice, the support they offer, and your own expertise & comform with WordPress site migrations.

Some of the options include

• Host assistedMany hosts will mgirate your WordPress site to their platform for you, either for "free", or for an additional fee. Check out their website, dashboard, or contact their support to see if this option is available and makes sense for you.
• Host migration plugin or systemA set of hosts offer a WordPress plugin that can be used to assist with migrating your site to their platform. Many of these are rebranded versions of the BlogVault / MigrateGuru plugin, while a few are custom built by the hosts themselves. Some of the hosts that offer such plugins include DreamHost, Pantheon, Pressable, WPEngine, Flywheel, Cloudways, SiteGround, LiquidWeb and Nexcess, Savvii, Bluehost, and WordPress.com. Note that we don't necessarily recommend any of these hosts or plugins, nor can we vouch for how well they work.
• Migration pluignThere are a number of different WordPress plugins that can be used to migrate (or backup & restore) your site from one host to another. The easy of use, speed, reliability, and compatibility with different hosting platforms can vary widely. Some of the plugins include All-in-One WP Migration, BlogVault, MigrateGuru, UpdraftPlus, Duplicator,WP Migrate Lite, Backup Migration, by BackupBliss, WP Vivid, WebToffee WordPress Backup & Migration, FastDup, Everest Backup, JetBackup, Backuply, PrimeMover, Transferito, WPSynchro, XCloner, WP Duplicate, WP Clone, and more ... Again, note that we don't necessarily recommend any of these plugins, nor can we vouch for how well they work.
• Management ServiceThere are also some services and site management tools that allow you to copy a site for migration or backup purposes. Two of the most popular ones include ManageWP and WP Remote. These services will usually still involve some type of WordPress plugin being installed on your site, but the cloning procedue is typically managed from their own dashboard, not from your old or new WordPress host. And again, we do not necessarily recommend either of these services, nor can we vouch for how well they work.
• Manual / DIYIf you're comfortable and familiar with copying files and restoring a MySQL database backup file, then you can often grab a copy of your site from SiteDistrict and restore it yourself onto the new host, using the tools and access that they provide, such as phpMyAdmin, SFTP, SSH, or a web based file manager.

If you're using either the Host Assisted option, or the Manual / DIY option, the easiest way to get ahold of a copy of the files & database for sites hosted on SITEDISTRICT is to head over to our Backups / Restore page in the Site Details view of our dashboard, for your site. More information can be found here

Note: It's possible that one of the services or plugins above may not work properly when trying to migrate a site off of SITEDISTRICT. This is typically - but not always - due to the SiteDistrict firewall blocking requests that do not appear legitimate for whatever reason. More information can be found on our Our Service or Tool is Being Blocked page. Any blocks are likely due to the nature of how the plugin or service operates - we do not explicitly block any of the specific plugins or services.

Updating DNS

The final step of a WordPress site migration is to update the DNS records at the DNS provider for your domain.

If you're not familiar with DNS, and how it relates to hosting, email, and your domain, you might review our pages on Domains and the Four Common Services and DNS Basics for Website Owners.

If you set up your DNS as recommended by us when your site was made live on SITEDISTRICT, there are two records that are of concern:

• The A record for your domain
• which may be reference by the domain (such as example.com), or by the character @
• will have the Value set to the SiteDistrict anycast IP address: 99.83.157.227
• The CNAME record for the www subdomain
• should point at (have a Value set to) the bare domain (such as example.com)

In most cases, to finish migrating your site to your new hosting provider, you will need to update just the main A record to the IP address provided by your new hosting provider.

If your site happens to use SITEDISTRICT as its DNS provider, you will want to move your DNS zone to a different DNS provider. The most common options are your domain registrar, your new hosting provider, or Cloudflare. Doing this typically requires exporting the zone file, importing to the new location, using tools at the new DNS provider to copy the DNS records, or manually copying the DNS records to the new DNS provider. The nameservers are then updated at your registrar to finalize the DNS switch.

Summary

This page covers the reasons why you or someone might want to, or is thinking they should move a site from SITEDISTRICT to another WordPress hosting provider. In many cases, this isn't necessarily a great idea, and many who think it's a good idea just are not aware of the tradeoffs.

Finally, we quickly and briefly cover the technical details of a WordPress site migration, including some of the options for copying a site, and the DNS updates that are typically required to finalize a site migration.