As technology evolves and innovative website hosting options become widely available, the need to update a business website is becoming more important to stay competitive and retain customers.
A Forbes report reveals that businesses with modern websites are likely to attract more customers and steer clear of security threats. However, migrating your website to a new host can be a lengthy and challenging process.
Migrating a website requires extreme caution to avoid adverse migration effects such as loss of traffic and rankings. In this article, we’ll provide essential tips on how to transfer domain from one host to another to ensure maximum visibility and superior user experience.
- Define your Goals and Objectives
Establishing your goals and objectives is vital in ensuring a successful transfer of your business website to a new host. Often, users make the mistake of transferring without considering the risks and potential rewards that go through with it. Failing to have a realistic understanding of the resources it will take to execute the transfer can increase the likelihood of errors, which could further increase downtime.
In other words, as a business owner, you may also want to ask yourself the question, “Why would I transfer my website to another host?” With that in mind, you may only have to transfer your website if a strong rebranding is needed or the migration will generate links and press. Having a strong enough reason will also help you tolerate the risks that come with the process and minimize traffic fluctuations.
- Inform Users
Informing your user base for a potential downtime when planning to transfer your website to another host is a critical yet unheralded aspect of the entire process. It is not uncommon for business owners to hide these changes from their customers since migrating to a new host does not take that long. However, this can ultimately backfire especially if you are serving a much larger customer base.
Therefore, you must provide a notice a few days ahead of the transfer process to your website and even your social media profiles. It is also important that your message is visible during the downtime to provide users with information on when the site will operate normally. This also prevents customer frustration which can potentially damage your overall reputation and result in users abandoning your business.
- Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider
After defining your goals and objectives and informing your customer base, it is time to find a new hosting provider and sign up for a web hosting package. With the right hosting provider, you can ensure that your website is accessible 24/7 and can handle more traffic as your business grows. However, finding the right hosting provider is seemingly a challenge with so many providers advertising that their product is a cut above the rest.
Although there is no one-size-fits-all narrative in choosing a reliable provider, it is important that you only opt for providers that guarantee a minimum of 99.5% uptime. This ensures that you won’t experience any downtime that could potentially cripple your income, sales, and overall reputation. You should also read reviews and testimonials online, especially from the ones within your industry to ensure that your chosen provider can handle your business website demands.
- Get Some Help
Having the technical knowledge of moving your website to a new host is necessary in ensuring a smooth database restoration. Therefore, you must ensure that your chosen hosting provider will guide you through the transfer process. This way, you can prevent broken links, change prefixes for each database effectively, and ensure that your databases are working properly.
Usually, a hosting provider’s support team has taken the highest paying college majors in web design and programming to ensure that they can perform the right steps in transferring websites. They will also help you in uploading the compressed files to a new server and in scripting web languages such as Perl, PHP, ASP, and CGI.
- Find and Download your Website
Finding and downloading your website files is another critical step that should not be taken lightly during the hosting migration process. The primary objective of this step is to take a digital image of your current site to ensure a smooth-sailing transfer over to your new site. With that, you should avoid configuring your files after they have been downloaded to prevent broken internal links and terrible site structure.
You may also want to check whether your site is using databases and identify whether it is possible to acquire backup folders for them. However, keep in mind that not all websites have to undergo this process because some sites have no database. Therefore, you should ask your current website transfer service provider whether your site uses a database or not to prevent transfer issues.
Ensuring a Successful Website Transfer
Many businesses steer clear of transferring their websites to a new hosting provider because of the many horror stories that come with the process. However, you can avoid these errors altogether by following the tips mentioned above to transfer a website to a new host and taking advantage of a web hosting provider such as GoSSDHosting. GoSSDHosting is a cutting-edge web hosting provider that provides users with SSD web hosting and a 99.95% uptime guarantee on top of its various hosting packages.
