A while ago we moved our dedicated WordPress hosting service for clients to WP Engine. It has everything we need: speed, security, automated backups, etc., but given that we have around 100 websites in our portfolio, the process of backing up a site, testing the move, adjusting, and then making sites live has been laborious to say the least.
Each site can take two to four hours for us to process. That means manually going through each of the requisite steps. At any point we could be interrupted or distracted, and, as we’re human, mistakes happen.
“It’s a farce editing all those database entries,” says our technical lead, Andy Holland. “And it’s not just making these changes once, you’re doing it on staging and then you need to do it exactly the same way when you push it live.”
We might catch any errors before the data starts transferring, we might not and have to start all over again.
That’s why we jumped at the chance recently to try WP Engine Automated Migration, a new plugin that eliminates the complexity and hassle of migrating a WordPress site. A key benefit of the plugin is that it does the searching and replacing for you, eliminating the farce of editing all of the database entries.
The data transfer itself will still take however long it takes depending on the size of the site, media, the connection speed etc. But what we’re taking out is the human error element. The standard steps are set up and the Automated Migration plugin will follow those through every time. In other words, once we have a successful push to staging, we can initiate a push to live. It’s an uncomplicated setup too – simply install the plugin on your existing site and fill in your WP Engine SFTP credentials.
So far we’ve saved ourselves days of billable time and we’re only a fraction of the way through our list of sites to transfer. Our online marketing team is happy too, as all the links in a site stay consistent; saving them the worry of lost visibility and further time spent running a new technical audit once the transfer is complete.
“We’re looking at a substantial time saving across our portfolio, time we can spend elsewhere for clients. It’s going from a few hours to several minutes – there’s still the time to transfer the data – but my efforts can be elsewhere whilst this happens,” Andy continued.
This time saved also means less time paying the host company too – we estimate we’ll move completely away from our old hosting company six to eight weeks earlier than initially anticipated.
We’ve also found that the skill threshold for transferring sites is now much lower; we’ve had the opportunity to train some of our more junior staff with the plugin; they’ve been able to use it with ease. So the time saved is going back into the business too, improving the service we offer – not bad at all!
Interested in WP Engine Automated Migration? From now through Monday, August 31, all new customers who sign up for annual or monthly Personal, Professional, or Business plans will receive free migration via WP Engine Automated Migration plus 20 percent off of your first payment. Use coupon code FreeMoveA for annual plans and FreeMoveM for monthly plans.
Owen Radford is online marketing manager at Elementary Digital, a dedicated WordPress agency based in London and Leeds, UK.
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