Lessons from Our WordPress Migration Fiasco

?? Lessons from Our WordPress Migration Fiasco

If you are a business owner with a WordPress website or a developer/agency providing WordPress development services, you might need to read this.

One of the USPs of our team is that we go extra mile beyond what we are paid for to do & care about the overall health of our client's business.

Though in most cases that results in some excellent growth for client’s business & another addition to our successful portfolio & case studies. There are some cases where our extra caring nature brings extra trouble for us.

Here is one such story. Hope you find it useful.

A client came as a referral from another client & wanted us to build a new website for her.

While going through her inventories, we’ve found that she was paying for separate single domain GoDaddy hostings for each of websites/domain names she own. She also had another single domain Bluehost hosting for another of her website/domain.

?? Lesson for Business #1: You can host multiple websites within a single multi domain shared hosting account. That’s not only economical but also easier to manage. Unless you have specific reasons to keep both site files separate, maintaining 1 web hosting account is better option.

?? Lesson for Business #2: GoDaddy hosting isn’t good at all in terms of performance, security & support, specially for WordPress websites. Choose Bluehost over GoDaddy at similar price points.

Naturally we suggested her that she should upgrade her Bluehost hosting account to multi domain hosting account & move all sites from multiple GoDaddy hosings into this single Bluehost multi domain hosting account.

And we offered to do it for free, while building her new website.

?? Lesson for Agency/Developer #1: Reconsider offering any service for free. Stay prepared for unforeseen hiccups.

One day suddenly I woke up with angry & frustrated messages from the client. Her site was down. As the website was the forefront of a running business, her customers complained and her employees were furious. Naturally our very nice client panicked as well. Can’t blame her.

She calmed down when we explained that it was a natural downtime expected during hosting migration. We should have done that earlier. Totally our fault.

?? Lesson for Business #3: Expect and accept a downtime ( even up to 48 hours in some cases) during the migration. It’s a necessary step, nothing can be done abut it. Inform your team about it in advance, so that they can address customer complaints appropriately.

?? Lesson for Agency/Developer #2: Stop expecting that client knows these things. They don’t. Always inform them about the downtime to expect before migration.

?? Lesson for Agency/Developer #3: Try to initiate the migration during the hours when the business is closed.

?? Lesson for Agency/Developer #4: Leave a message to the client informing them that you are initiating the migration.

So now the website was looking good to public and was LIVE on new hosting account.

Happy ending right? Nope.

After a while the client reported that she was unable to edit the website. She was getting a blank page trying to edit any pages in the site.

We suspected it might be due to the new WordPress 5.0 Branch and installed the ‘Classic Editor’ plugin.

?? Lesson for Agency/Developer #5: if you are facing any editor related issue in a site with WordPress 5.0 or above, try installing ‘Classic Editor’ plugin first and see if it fixes the issue.

Now we could open the page editor but still it was not working properly. Not content was showing up in the Editor box and WPBakery Page Builder was not loading at all.

Client was furious again and thought that we must have messed up something during the migration. Did we?

Apparently we did not. After wasting a lot of time inspecting where did we mess up, we realised that the issue was due to the non compatibility of the outdated theme used in the site with the latest WordPress version.

The site was running on outdated WordPress 3.8 while it was in GoDaddy hosting, but as we’ve migrated it to Bluehost where WordPress 5.0.3 was installed, the outdated theme stopped working. The theme was so outdated that it was not compatible with WordPress 4.0 - 5.0 either.

While the temporary solution looks like not updating WordPress so that your site with outdated theme continue to function properly, is it advisable? Could we have avoided the issue by moving the site to new hosting with outdated WordPress?

We will strongly advise against it.

And yes, we could have avoided the issue temporarily by moving the website with outdated WordPress, but as I said, we care too much for our clients.

?? Lesson for Business #4: Always ensure that your WordPress version is up to date. Use of outdated WordPress version can affect your site’s security, performance severely. Plus you’ll be missing out latest features and improvements.

But understand that it might be extra work for your developer. Specially if your developer has built your website with a theme that doesn’t keep itself updated with latest WordPress releases. If you use a theme like Enfold that is regularly updated, normally no additional work is needed from your developer’s end.

If your developer has modified the original theme files, then getting new theme updates can overwrite those customisations. That is another reason your developer might recommend you to continue using outdated theme, and consequently outdated WordPress to stay compatible.

But in such cases, a good developer would have used a Child theme to make the customisations.

All good themes have child theme with them. Using child theme, the customisations will stay intact, while you’ll continue to enjoy the theme updates as well.

?? Lesson for Business #5: Ask your developer to show you how frequently the chosen theme for your site gets updated. Check the reviews and its reputation by yourself if possible.

?? Lesson for Business #6: Ask your developer if the theme they are using includes a license for you or not. If not, then how can you expect to get the theme updates. Would your developer update your theme regularly ( once in 6 months is fine normally) in exchange for a small fee (considerably smaller than the theme price) or should you buy a license by your own?

?? Lesson for Agency/Developer #6: Don’t experiment with WordPress themes for client sites. Use proven regularly updated themes like Enfold / Divi. Any layout can be built using these themes.

?? Lesson for Agency/Developer #7: Clearly explain to client what they can expect regarding theme update if you are building the site with an unlicensed version.

?? Lesson for Agency/Developer #8: If you must edit the theme files, always install and edit the child theme, not parent theme. If your theme doesn’t provide a child theme, then you shouldn’t use that theme anyway.

Naturally, not knowing these technicalities, our client didn’t ask for theme files or license from her previous developer. And she thought her site was perfect that we messed up during migration, while it was a ticking time bomb.

Eventually either GoDaddy might have stopped supporting WordPress 3.8 or her site might have gotten hacked or performance issues might have made it unusable. And the moment she would have tried updating WordPress, she would have faced these same issues that came to light after the migration.

So to fix the site, we needed the theme files that she didn’t have. And she expected us to fix the site without those, as she thought we’ve messed it up. 

Thankfully we could clarify her the whole picture. She reached out to her previous developer and got access to the theme files.

Once we had those files, we simply had to update the theme to latest version compatible with WordPress 5.0.3. Site was fully functional within minutes.

Voila. That’s a happy ending you can say.

But to reach there, our client had to endure a panic stricken week, her business suffered for a week & our teammates had to spend sleepless nights working on a task that we’ve offered to do for free. Not only no remuneration for all the effort that went into it, but also resulting in client disappointment that we rarely face.

After facing all these troubles, we could not make our client see the money we’ve saved for her that she was wasting on terrible GoDaddy hostings, or the value of getting an updated website compatible with latest WordPress version that she would have to pay for otherwise.

But it’s okay. We understand. It’s not possible for non technical business owners to understand every technical thing that’s going on in the background.

Hence this post.

Hoping our experience might enlighten some business owner regarding their understanding of their website & some developer/agency to avoid disappointing their clients while trying to help them.

?? Share this to spread awareness. Tag someone in the comments who might need to read this.

?? What other issues have you faced as a business owner or a digital marketing professional? Let's have a discussion.