Migration
Moving over takes about a week, and the site never goes dark.
We do the work and it’s included in the price. You don’t need to have a difficult conversation with your current host, and patients booking appointments won’t notice anything happened.
We copy the site
A complete copy of files and database goes onto our server and runs on a private address only you and we can see. Your live site carries on serving patients throughout. Nothing at your current host is touched or cancelled.
You check it over
You get the private link. Click through the pages that matter, submit a test enquiry, check the booking flow. Tell us what’s wrong and we fix it while the live site is still untouched. This step takes as long as you need it to.
We switch the DNS
Done outside clinic hours, usually early evening. Visitors move across gradually over a few hours as DNS propagates. We watch the site for the next 48 hours and keep the old copy for 30 days.
What we need from you
- Access to the current hosting — control panel or FTP. If you don’t have it, see below.
- Access to the domain name — wherever it’s registered. This is the one thing we can’t work around, because DNS is how the switch happens.
- A WordPress administrator login.
- An hour of someone’s attention at the checking stage. Ideally whoever knows what the site is supposed to do.
The awkward cases
You’ve lost touch with whoever built it
Common, and usually solvable. If the domain is registered in the practice’s name we can normally recover control through the registrar. If the site itself is on hosting we can’t get into, we can often rebuild from the public site — it isn’t ideal and it isn’t free, but practices are rarely as stuck as they fear.
The domain is registered to your web designer
This one is worth checking today, whether or not you ever move host. If your practice domain is registered in someone else’s name, you don’t control the address patients use to find you. Look it up on a WHOIS search. If it isn’t yours, ask for it to be transferred while the relationship is still a good one.
Your email is on the same hosting
Then we plan the email move first and separately, because DNS changes affect mail delivery and getting that wrong means missed patient enquiries. We don’t host email — it goes to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. It’s chargeable work, and we’ll be clear about the cost before we start.
The site is already compromised
We find this occasionally during the copy stage — injected spam pages, an unfamiliar admin user, a plugin that isn’t what it claims. We’ll tell you straight away and quote the clean-up separately. We won’t migrate a compromised site onto our platform and quietly hope.
And if you want to leave us
You get a full export of files and database, and we’ll talk directly to your new host to make it painless. No exit fee, no notice games, no holding the site hostage while someone chases a renewal. It’s your website. The only reason to stay is that the service is worth paying for.
Start with a look, not a commitment
Send the domain and we’ll tell you what’s involved in moving it, including whether it’s worth doing at all.