Moving to WordPress VIP is not a hosting migration. You are not changing servers; you are changing how your organisation runs its digital publishing. This page covers what the move actually involves, what sets the timeline, and where projects get stuck.
Wider context: what WordPress VIP is. Service levels: plans.
The timeline is not set by the size of your site
What sets it is how your team works today. The two ends look like this:
- A team already working to a governed process: the migration is largely a technical exercise. It is planned, done, finished.
- A team making changes directly on the live site: the migration is a habits project. The technical work is the same, but the way the team works has to change too, and that is the longest item on the plan.
The second is not bad news. Most organisations want that discipline anyway; VIP makes it mandatory. But walk in without planning for it and the surprise arrives mid-project.
How the migration runs
1. Inventory and decisions
Every component of your current setup is listed individually and assigned one of three decisions: keep, redundant because the platform already does it, or will not work, needs a replacement.
The middle category is larger than people expect. A significant share of the security, backup and speed tools added over the years become redundant on VIP, because the platform already handles them. This phase sets the scope and duration of the project; skip it and the surprises come later.
2. Bringing the site up to standard
Your existing site passes the platform’s quality and security standards. This is not cosmetic: structures accumulated over the years that weaken performance or security get cleared out here. For most organisations this phase is the most valuable by-product of the whole move.
3. Environment setup and team transition
The publishing pipeline is built, test environments prepared, and the team brought onto the new flow. Changes reach the live site within minutes and can be reversed in one step if something is wrong. In organisational terms: going live stops being a risky event.
4. Content and images
Your archive moves across. Images pass onto the platform’s own delivery network and are optimised automatically, with no separate tool required. On image-heavy sites the improvement in page speed is the fastest visible result of the migration.
5. Going live
Domains are connected, certificates installed, and the switch made. Planned properly, this phase is invisible to visitors.
The most expensive mistake: losing search visibility
A technically flawless migration that drops organic traffic is a failed project. This is the most common and most costly error in platform moves, and its effect is not immediate: the loss is usually noticed weeks later.
What has to be protected: the address structure staying intact, or being fully redirected where it cannot be; the way search engines read the site not changing; language relationships surviving on multilingual setups; and a performance baseline taken before the move so it can be compared after.
Ask any agency quoting you how they handle these. If they cannot describe a concrete method, the risk stays with you.
What to settle during contracting
Some platform configurations are fixed at provisioning and cannot be changed by you afterwards. We found this by testing: something the documentation describes as “contact support if needed” turned out to be an enforced restriction in practice.
The practical consequence: if you have a specific structural requirement, especially a multi-country, multi-language structure, put it on the table during contracting. Raising it mid-migration disrupts the timeline badly.
Let us build your inventory
The scope and duration of a migration are decided in phase one. We can review your current setup and hand you a breakdown with a keep, redundant or replace decision against every component. With that in hand, the quote you receive sharpens and you can see the real weight of the move.
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