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Safe transition when switching agencies

WordPress Migration

WordPress migration without downtime or lost SEO. We move your website from the old agency — with 301 redirects, DNS handling and upgraded infrastructure.

The agency vanished.
Now what?

Response time has become unacceptable. Not on the website. From the agency. Three days to change a text. A week to update a plugin. Or worse: no reply at all.

You have 37 plugins, half of them deactivated, and nobody can explain what they do. Proprietary themes, custom build tools, hosting you can't manage yourself. The invoices don't make sense. Hours billed for "maintenance" that produce no visible changes.

We see this constantly. Small agencies shut down. Freelancers change industries. Suddenly you're stuck with a website nobody can log in to, on a server you don't have access to. The good news: WordPress is open source. Nobody can hold you hostage. But moving WordPress from one provider to another is an infrastructure project, not a copy-paste operation.

6 steps

Documented migration process

0s

Downtime during DNS switchover

100%

301 redirects for all URLs

<200 ms

Response time after migration

What WordPress migration actually involves

There are plugins that promise "1-click migration". They work for hobby projects. For a business website with Nordic payment solutions, CRM integrations and thousands of indexed pages in Google? You need a plan.
01 / 06

Database

WordPress stores everything in MySQL. Posts, pages, settings, user data, WooCommerce orders. The database must be exported, transformed (URL references updated) and imported to the new server. Get this wrong and you end up with 404 pages and broken internal links.
02 / 06

Files and media

The wp-content folder contains themes, plugins and all uploaded images. For websites with a few thousand media files, we're easily talking several gigabytes that must be transferred intact.
03 / 06

DNS and domain

The most underestimated part. DNS changes don't propagate instantly. It typically takes 1 to 24 hours. In the meantime, some visitors hit the old server, others the new one. Without planning, this means downtime.
04 / 06

Email

Many forget email entirely during migration. If your business email is tied to the same domain and hosting, a careless DNS change can take down all email communication. That's probably the fastest way to create panic in an organization.
05 / 06

SEO preservation

Google has indexed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of URLs on your site. Each one has built up authority. Without correct redirect mapping, you lose that authority.
06 / 06

Configuration and integrations

Contact forms, payment flows, Vipps, BankID, API connections to CRM and accounting systems. Everything must be verified in the new environment. A webshop that looks right but has the wrong payment gateway is worse than downtime.

Common WordPress migration mistakes

  • No redirect plan. The URL structure changes, but nobody sets up 301 redirects. Google finds only 404 pages. Rankings plummet, and it takes months to recover them.
  • DNS change on a Friday afternoon. Propagation takes time. Problems surface over the weekend. Nobody is available. Monday morning the business has no website and no email.
  • Skipping staging. Migrating straight to production without testing. WooCommerce checkout doesn't work. Contact form sends to the wrong address. Vipps points to the old server.
  • Copying technical debt. You migrate 37 plugins, 3 deactivated themes and a database full of spam comments. You've moved the junk from one house to another.
  • Ignoring email. MX records point to the old server. DNS changes. Email stops. Customer inquiries disappear into a digital black hole.

Six steps to a
safe transition

We've migrated WordPress websites from everything. Outdated cPanel hosting. Proprietary platforms where the agency refused to cooperate. Situations where nobody remembered the login details. The process is the same regardless of the starting point.

Before we touch anything, we map out what exists. Plugins, themes, customizations, integrations, database size, media library. We crawl all URLs and document the entire site structure for redirect mapping. We also identify what shouldn't be migrated. Deactivated plugins. Unused themes. Spam in the database. Migration is the perfect opportunity to clean house.

The entire website is set up on a staging environment. You get access and can verify everything yourself. The actual DNS switchover happens at an agreed time, typically early on a business day. The old server stays active in parallel until we've confirmed all traffic is hitting the new server. We monitor everything for the first 48 hours.

PXL's migration process

AssessmentAudit of everything that exists. Plugins, themes, customizations, integrations, database size. We crawl all URLs for redirect mapping and identify what should be cleaned out.
PlanConcrete migration plan with date, time and rollback strategy. Who does what. What needs to happen before the DNS change. Communication plan so everyone in the organization knows what's happening.
StagingThe entire website on a new environment, temporary domain. Everything is tested here: forms, payment flows, Vipps, BankID, email sending, internal links. You get access to staging and can verify yourself.
SEO preparationComplete redirect map for all indexed pages. Google Search Console notification. Updated sitemap. Verified robots.txt. Canonical tags pointing to the new URL structure.
DNS switchoverTTL is lowered in advance for faster propagation. The switch happens early on a business day, never on a Friday. Old server runs in parallel until all traffic hits the new server. Zero downtime.
Monitoring48 hours of active monitoring. Traffic, error logs, email delivery, search engine indexing. We verify that Google crawl works and that 301 redirects hit correctly. You receive a completion report.

SEO preservation during migration

With the right setup, you lose nothing. Google needs time to process changes, and you'll see temporary variation in Search Console during the first weeks. That's normal. The key is that the redirect plan is complete and the new website has at least equally good technical SEO.
01 / 04

301 redirects for all URLs

Not just the front page and the most important landing pages. All indexed URLs. Including image files, PDFs and old blog posts from 2019. Incomplete redirect mapping is the most common cause of ranking loss after migration.
02 / 04

Sitemap submission

New sitemap is submitted to Google Search Console immediately after switchover. Old sitemap is removed. Google gets a clear signal that the URL structure has been updated.
03 / 04

Canonical tags

All pages must have correct canonical tags pointing to the new URL structure. Incorrect canonical is worse than no canonical. We verify every single page after migration.
04 / 04

Search Console verification

We verify the new domain in Search Console, notify about address change for domain switches, and monitor the coverage report during the first weeks. Crawl errors are caught and fixed immediately.

Before and after migration

butikken.no4.1s
Old hosting · Apache/PHP-FPM
butikken.no165ms
PXL infrastructure · FrankenPHP

WordPress migration isn't just about moving from A to B. It's an opportunity to upgrade the entire setup. Most sites we migrate run on cheap shared hosting with cPanel and FTP. No version control, no staging, no CI/CD. After migration: FrankenPHP with intelligent caching, Git-based version control and automated backups [1].

  1. [1]Google — Core Web Vitals & Page Experience

What WordPress migration costs

The price depends on complexity. A simple blog with ten pages is something entirely different from a WooCommerce store with 5,000 products and Vipps integration. We always provide a fixed price after the initial assessment.

Simple business website (5–20 pages)

Audit, staging, switchover, 48h monitoring

NOK 8,000–15,000

Medium with integrations

+ CRM connection, complex redirect mapping, email separation

NOK 15,000–35,000

WooCommerce webshop

+ Payment integrations, order history, product catalog

NOK 25,000–60,000

Enterprise

+ Multi-country setup, complex APIs, high traffic

from NOK 60,000

Do you actually need migration?

Honestly: not always. If your website works fine, hosting is fast enough, you have access to everything and your agency delivers, there's no reason to move. Migration for migration's sake is wasted time and money.

But if you recognize the problems we describe — the agency vanished, response time is unacceptable or you're locked into proprietary systems — then migration is the way out. Technical debt grows. Security holes multiply. The longer you wait, the more expensive the cleanup becomes.

Plan the migration during a quiet period. Not in the middle of a campaign, not the week before Black Friday, not during summer vacation. Start the process two to four weeks before the desired switchover date. And if the agency has vanished completely? Then it's urgent. Without someone to monitor and update WordPress, your website is an open target for attacks.

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