Posting has been somewhat quiet recently because I started getting a bit more serious about the site’s infrastructure in an error to give the site’s visitor’s a better experience while hopefully improving the site’s SEO. Namely, I dumped godaddy as my hosting provider and updated my wordpress theme to thesis. The process has been surprisingly painful; I aim to help others avoid some of my mistakes.
The rash of changes on this site were all precipitated by Google’s recent announcement that site speed will now factor into your SEO rankings. A quick glance at the chart below is telling. My site was slow; dog slow. The ridiculous number of wordpress plugins coupled with the subpar hosting was resulting in a site that was slower than 85% of all sites. Considering this is a simple wordpress blog site, with fewer than 100 pages, that’s unacceptable. Not only is the slowness adversely affecting Google rankings based on Google’s new Caffeine algorithms, it’s also painful for visitors to watch the site load so slowly.
Webmaster Tools Site Performance Not so Great
In order to move from one host to another, there are a number of steps involved. Basically, you’re saving down all of the information you may need from your old site, uploading it to your new site, then updating the DNS to point to your new host. Although it sounds simple, if these steps are done out of order, the results could be disastrous.
- Backup your wordpress site database / posts – there are a couple ways to do this. The easiest is to use wordpress’ export feature to dump all posts into an XML file, which you can then upload from the interface of the new blog. Alternatively, you can export the database using a SQL dump and import under your new install.
Wordpress Export Function
- Copy your wordpress directories from the old install using SSH or FTP.
- Set up the new host, including installing wordpress from scratch, or uploading all of the directories from your old install.
- Copy your theme customizations & settings (it’s much easier to do this before you turn off your old host!). Thesis even has an option to save the settings into a file which can be uploaded later.
- Copy down theme files and (necessary) plugins. These reside in the wp-contents>themes folder and wp-contents>plugins folder. In the spirit of housekeeping, improving your site’s load time and user experience, it’s a great time to reassess how many plugins you’re using, whether or not your CSS can be consolidated, etc.
- Update the DNS entry on the domain name to point to the new host.
- Wait. This step, too is slightly underrated. This stuff takes time to take effect. If you don’t wait long enough, you’re bound to get frustrated by seeing something unexpected. Give it a chance to breathe.
All in all, the site’s much better for having made the changes. Thesis replaces a ton of plugins with modular, built-in functionality, and my new host is a lot faster than godaddy. Having gone through the process, though, there’s a lot I’ll do differently next time.
Do you have any tips for migrating that I might’ve missed?
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