Moving a WordPress site between hosts is the part people dread, usually because they've done it the hard way before — export, import, broken images, a day of downtime, a sinking feeling. CloudPerch's guided migration is built to take that off your plate. You hand us the keys, we rebuild your site on a private address, you check it over, and only then does anything change for your visitors.

The whole approach rests on one principle: your current site stays live and untouched until the new one is verified. There's no window where both are half-working. This guide explains what's covered, what we need from you, and how the hand-off goes.

What free guided migration covers

Guided migration is included — free — and on Aerie it's a fully guided, white-glove move. In practice it means we bring across the things that make your site your site:

  • All your content — posts, pages, media, menus.
  • Your theme and its customisations.
  • Your plugins and their settings.
  • Your database.

We rebuild it on CloudPerch's fast NVMe storage with LiteSpeed and server-level caching already tuned, so the migrated site usually comes out quicker than the one you left. If your move is time-sensitive, the $29 priority migration add-on jumps you up the queue.

The goal isn't just to copy your site. It's to land it on a faster floor with daily backups and SSL already sorted — so the move is also an upgrade.

What we need from you

To rebuild your site faithfully, we need a way in. Exactly what depends on your current host, but it's usually one or two of these:

  1. WordPress admin access — an admin login to your existing wp-admin, or a migration plugin's export.
  2. Hosting or file access — SFTP/FTP details, or your current host's control panel login, so we can pull files and the database directly.
  3. A few details — the current domain, and anything unusual we should know about (a membership plugin, a store mid-order, a staging copy you'd rather we use).

Send these through the secure channel we point you to when you start a migration from your dashboard or the contact page. Please don't email passwords around — we'll always give you a safe way to share them.

We build and verify on a subdomain first

Here's the part that makes this safe. Every new CloudPerch site gets a free, instant your-site.cloudperch.io subdomain — live immediately, no DNS wait. We rebuild your migrated site on that subdomain.

That gives you a complete, working copy of your site at a private address while your real domain still points at your old host. Nothing about your live site has changed yet.

  1. We migrate your content, theme, plugins, and database onto the subdomain.
  2. We run our own checks — pages load, images resolve, the cache behaves.
  3. We hand you the subdomain link to review at your own pace.

Click around. Check the pages that matter, log into the admin, place a test order if you run a store. This is the moment to catch anything before it's public.

The DNS cut-over

Only once you're happy does the switch happen — and it's just a DNS change. You point your domain at CloudPerch (the connect an existing domain guide has the exact records), and traffic starts arriving at the new, verified site.

A few things worth knowing about the cut-over:

  • Your old site stays live until the new one is verified and the DNS change propagates. There's no gap where your domain points at nothing.
  • SSL issues itself automatically once DNS resolves to us — usually within a few minutes — so visitors land on https:// with a padlock from the start.
  • Daily backups are already running on the new site, with 30-day retention, from the moment it exists.

If you'd rather we time the cut-over with you on a call, just say so when you start.

Where to go next

That's the whole journey: keys in, rebuild on a subdomain, verify, then a clean DNS switch with the old site live the entire time.

Ready to start, or want to scope an unusual setup first? Reach us from the contact page, or see what each tier includes on pricing.