I’ve finally bitten the bullet and migrated to a grown up hosting provider (WPEngine) after Bluehost shafted me one time too many.
I am migrating to WP Engine.
Why I Migrated To WPEngine
I was previously using Bluehost and there were three main reasons I moved over:
- Site getting closed down with little warning for using too many database tables
- Constant downtime, the Jetpack monitor would tell me of outages 2 -3 times per week
- Snarky comments from the support team
I went to WP Engine for the excellent security and speed I had seen when moving clients over.
The Migration Process
I’m not going to bang on about the pros or cons of WP Engine, what I really want to highlight in this post is how simple it is to migrate all your content, migration is a real headache and WP Engine has done a great job of making this as easy as possible.
I’ve done a number of manual migrations for clients in the past and it has been a bit of a pain, but there new system is super simple.
Migration is one of the biggest barriers to entry to it makes sense for WP Engine to make the process as smooth as possible.
Install Plugin
The migration process is as simple as installing a plugin, download this from your wpengine account, install it on your existing account.
Populate the plugin with some migrate SFTP details to copy over your
Sit Back And Migrate
It will take some time to do the migration, it was about an hour for WP Dude, but I did nothing in that time but watch a progress bar.
WP Engines Migration Video
Check out WP Engines migration video to see how simple this process is.
One Small Issue
I did notice one small issue, a number of internal links on my site were pointing to wpdude.wpegine.com the test URL of my site before I migrated my domain, I installed a plugin called Better Search And Replace and did a search and replace (surprisingly) to change then all back, I’ll record a video tutorial soon on better search and replace.
Wrap Up
If you were thinking about moving over to WP Engine, but were wary because of the effort to move over your database and files, don’t be it was super simple and required no technical skill.
WP Engine is not cheap but it is super fast and secure and their on-boarding was exceptional.
6 thoughts on “Migrating To WPEngine”
Neil, great post. I have been looking & talking with WP Engine for quite some time. My hangup has always been the cost. Tough to get clients to pay 3x-4x more than they pay in hosting now. But I guess in the future I can offer it as a premium service. If they want to go with it, they can do it, if not they can stay at the current hosting & potentially have some issues & pains that go with it.
I switched from Inmotion Hosting for the very same reasons, Neil; however, I chose getflywheel.com (Flywheel) because they did the migration free for me. In addition, their troubleshooting has been excellent on some little issues that I couldn’t fix.
Once I switch to them my site became lightning-fast. And I sure like their prices too!
Both are great hosts.
I’ve not worked with this hosting before I’ll check them out
Thanks Neil, this is interesting and timely as had been wondering about WPEngine for a while, currently use Dreamhost (overall pretty pleased with their support) – they emailed me this week about their new Managed WordPress hosting so am a bit confused all over again about how this now compares with WPEngine…
Hi Karen
I’ve worked with dreamhosts managed WordPress hosting dreampress, it’s good, but not as optimised as Wp Engine in my opinion
Good choice – I LOVE WP Engine!
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