How to migrate WordPress to Cloudways without downtime

You can migrate a WordPress site to Cloudways for free in two ways: run the Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin yourself, or ask Cloudways' team to do it as a managed migration. Either way, your old site stays live while the copy is made, and visitors only arrive at Cloudways when you change your DNS. Downtime is avoidable as long as you prepare the DNS a day early and leave your email records alone.

This guide covers which method to use, the plugin steps with the fields it asks for, how to test the copy before anyone sees it, and the cut-over itself. It ends with what to do when the plugin fails, which it occasionally does on large or locked-down sites.

Plugin or managed migration?

Both are free for WordPress and WooCommerce. The plugin is self-service, has no limit on how many sites you move, and is usually done within the hour. The managed migration is handled by Cloudways engineers: you submit a request from Integrations, then Application Migration, with access to your old host (SSH, SFTP, FTP or cPanel) and your WordPress admin login, and they do the copy.

Use the plugin when the site is a normal WordPress install under a few gigabytes and you want it done today. Use the managed route when the site is very large, when your old host blocks plugins from connecting out, or when you would rather not deal with it. Non-WordPress applications such as Magento or Laravel can only use the managed service, which costs $99 per application after the first one on a standard account.

Prepare before you copy anything

• Lower your DNS TTL. At your DNS provider, set the TTL on your A records to 300 seconds (five minutes) at least a day before the move. When you change the records later, visitors will follow within minutes instead of hours.
• Find out where your email lives. If your mailboxes are at your current host, they will not move to Cloudways, which does not host email. Your MX records must keep pointing at whatever handles mail now, or you need a new mail provider set up first. Our email guide covers the options.
• Check for .htaccess rules. Look at the .htaccess file on the old host. If it holds more than the standard WordPress block, either choose the Hybrid stack on Cloudways or plan to rebuild those rules as Web Rules on the Lightning Stack.
• Take a full backup on the old host, whatever its tools allow. It is your safety net if anything goes wrong.

Copy the site with the migrator plugin

Create the destination on Cloudways

Launch a server sized for the site, with at least 2 GB of RAM for anything live, and add a WordPress application to it. The migrator copies into this application and overwrites it, so a fresh install is what you want. If you are adding the site to a server you already run, add a new WordPress application rather than reusing one.

Open the new application's Access Details and note four things: the temporary application URL ending in cloudwaysapps.com, the server's public IP address, the SFTP username and password under the application credentials, and the database name. The plugin needs all of them. Our WordPress setup guide covers launching the server if this is your first one.

Run the Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin

1. Install the plugin on the old site. In the old site's WordPress admin, go to Plugins, Add New, search for "Cloudways WordPress Migrator" and activate it.
2. Enter the destination details. The plugin asks for your email, the destination site URL (the temporary cloudwaysapps.com address), the database name, the SFTP host (the server IP), the SFTP username and password, and the remote path, which is the application's public_html folder as shown in Access Details.
3. Start the migration and leave the browser tab alone. The plugin copies files and the database to the new application and rewrites the site's URLs to the temporary address.
4. Wait for the email. You get a notification when it finishes. Small sites take minutes; sites with several gigabytes of media take longer.

Test, then cut over

Test the copy before changing DNS

Open the temporary address and go through the site as a visitor would: the home page, a few posts, any forms, search, and for a shop, add to cart and the checkout page. Log in to the WordPress admin there too. Things to look for are missing images, broken links that still point at the old domain, plugins that complain about a changed licence domain, and any page that errors.

Some plugins behave differently on a temporary URL, mostly caching and security plugins. If something looks wrong only there, you can preview the real domain instead by adding a line to your computer's hosts file that points your domain at the Cloudways IP. That shows you exactly what visitors will see after the switch, while everyone else still sees the old host.

Cut over to Cloudways

1. Add your domain in Cloudways. In the application's Domain Management, add the real domain and make it primary. Cloudways updates the WordPress URLs from the temporary address to your domain.
2. Change the A records for @ and www to the Cloudways server IP. Leave MX and any mail-related TXT records exactly as they are.
3. Install the SSL certificate once the new IP is visible, from the application's SSL Certificate page, covering both the bare domain and www.
4. Keep the old host running for a few days. Some visitors' DNS caches update late. Cancel the old account only after a week of traffic on Cloudways with no surprises.

For a WooCommerce store or a site with comments and form entries arriving all the time, anything written to the old site between the copy and the cut-over is lost. Either put the old shop into a short maintenance window and run the migrator again just before the DNS change, or re-run it and accept an order freeze of a few minutes. Our WooCommerce guide covers store-specific settings for after the move.

When the migration does not work

• The plugin cannot connect over SFTP. Re-copy the application credentials, check the remote path ends in public_html, and look at the server's Security page, under Shell Access, in case IP restrictions are blocking the connection.
• It stalls or times out. Usually a very large uploads folder or a host that limits outbound connections. Remove old backups stored inside wp-content, then retry, or switch to a managed migration.
• The site loads but redirects to the old domain. Something still holds the old URL, often a hard-coded value in wp-config.php or a caching plugin's settings. Clear Breeze's cache and check Settings, General.
• Pages 404 except the home page. Re-save the permalink settings in the WordPress admin. On the Lightning Stack, also check whether the old site depended on .htaccess rewrites.
• The copy is fine but slow. Compare like with like: turn on Redis, check the PHP version matches or exceeds the old one, and look at the server's Monitoring graphs for memory pressure.

Cloudways' live chat supports migrations on the Standard plan, and if the plugin keeps failing, a managed migration request is the quickest way through. The 3-day trial is enough for most moves if you start the copy on the first day.