How Long Does It Take to Migrate a Website?

The honest answer is that the clock starts before anything moves. Most of the time in a migration is not spent copying files — it is spent making sure nothing breaks once they land somewhere new. Here is roughly where the time actually goes.

Why size is only part of it

A 2GB database of product images may take minutes to copy. The same site's behaviour takes hours to verify. What matters far more than file size is how many moving parts the site has:

• Does it run on a database? WordPress, Joomla, Shopify imports, most booking systems — yes.
• Does it send or receive email? Moving mail means changing DNS records, and getting it wrong quietly breaks form notifications.
• Does it take payments? Anything with a checkout needs testing end to end.
• Is it built on hard-coded paths? Sites from the early 2000s often contain absolute links to the old domain, which break silently.
• How often does it change? Migrating a busy shop while it is taking orders is a different job from copying a dormant site.

What the actual process looks like

1. Audit the existing site — check the stack, size, plugins, mail, redirects and any existing rules in the .htaccess or nginx config. This is where surprises surface.
2. Take a full backup first. Always. Even on the old host, even though it's being abandoned. This is your only rollback.
3. Copy files and database to the new account, then update the database's internal paths if the domain or username changes.
4. Test on a temporary address — usually a subdomain or a hosts-file override — so you can click through every page without touching live DNS.
5. Fix what breaks. Usually broken image paths, a stale cache, or an SSL certificate that doesn't match yet.
6. Move DNS and reduce the old TTL beforehand so the switch-over is fast rather than spread over 24–48 hours.
7. Keep the old host live for a few days in case something surfaces that we didn't find.

What can go wrong

In our experience, the same handful of issues cause almost every migration problem:

• Email stops. The site still looks fine, but form submissions vanish because mail is going to the old server. Always re-point MX records and test sending.
• SSL mismatch. The certificate hasn't been issued for the new account yet, so visitors see a browser warning.
• Hard-coded URLs. Old themes and templates often reference http://old-domain.co.uk absolutely. A site-wide search-and-replace fixes it.
• The database user changes. WordPress stores the database username and password in wp-config.php. If either differs on the new host and isn't updated, the site returns a database error.
• PHP version mismatch. An old site built for PHP 7 can break on a server running PHP 8. This is the most common cause of a site that looks right in files but renders blank.

Do you need to migrate at all?

Sometimes staying put is cheaper than moving. Keep your current host if:

• your renewal is due months away and the price is competitive;
• your current host has answered your emails well;
• the site is large and stable, and nothing is wrong with it.

Move if your host has gone slow, support has gone quiet, you're being pushed onto a higher plan to keep existing features, or you've had to ask them the same question twice. Slow support is a legitimate reason on its own — the server is the easy part to get right.