If you haven’t moved your website before, you will believe that it is a trivial matter probably. In the end, it only involves copying files onto the new server, right? Actually there’s more to it than fulfills the attention. I’ll deal with both the mundane aspects, that is, the checklist of things you must do, as well as the greater problematic situation of assisting you minimise (“minimize” in US English) your lack of visitors. Note that there are some distinctions between moving your site when you yourself have your own domain name and moving it when you do not. I’ll try to cover both these instances in this specific article.
The funny thing about websites is that regardless of what everyone recommends officially, there is still people (more than you think) who actually only maintain only 1 duplicate of their website: the main one on the internet server. If you are one particular, make sure a copy is manufactured by you of your website on your computer.
- Save this file and close WordPad
- Other misc or specialized elements
- Are you alright with stock imagery
- SMS and MMS
- IBM Commerce
This needs to be done even BEFORE you inform your old web host that you are terminating. Actually, it could be wise NOT to tell your old host you are terminating just yet, since some people who run web hosts react badly. They could terminate your account before you’re ready, throttle your bandwidth or other such petty things down.
It really depends upon how professional (and mature) individuals working that service are. To copy your files, just use the technique that you normally take to publish your data files, and download them instead. If it is done by you through FTP, then down load them using FTP. If you are using a browser to access your site via your web hosts’ control panel, then do it that way.
If you’re on a free hosting company with advertisements (pop-ups, banners or otherwise), you ought not to simply hook up to your site with a browser and save the page you see. Such pop-ups and banners are inserted at the server level normally, modifying your webpages on the fly to include some additional JavaScript code to generate the pop-ups.
When you save it the standard way your visitors do, you’re also saving the pop-up code the server adds. Of course you can merely edit later the file to delete it, but why give yourself extra work? The next step is to check all of your internal links to make sure you don’t have any hardcoded URLs pointing to the old address.