Moving your website to a new hosting provider is one of those tasks that looks simple until something goes wrong. Lose your email archives, miss a DNS step, or forget to unblock search engines — and you're facing days of frustration and potentially months of SEO recovery. This checklist covers the four most critical steps to get right before you make the move.
Backup — Download All Your Website Files
Before anything else, download a complete copy of your existing website. Don't trust that your old host will keep your files available once you cancel your account — some providers delete everything immediately. The safest approach is to connect to your hosting server via FTP and download every file manually.
If FTP feels intimidating, Mac users can use a tool called Sitesucker, which crawls and downloads an entire website by following links, just like a search engine spider. It's not a replacement for a proper FTP backup (it won't capture backend files, databases, or email), but it's a quick way to get a local copy of your visible website content.
For WordPress sites, also export your database (via phpMyAdmin or your host's control panel) and download your wp-content folder — this contains all your uploads, themes, and plugins.
Email — Download All Your Email Boxes First
This is the step people most commonly forget, and the one with the most painful consequences. If your email is hosted with your current web host and you're moving hosts, your email history will be deleted the moment you change your DNS to point to the new server.
The critical thing to understand is the difference between POP3 and IMAP email protocols. With POP3, emails are downloaded from the server to your local device and (typically) deleted from the server. With IMAP, emails stay on the server and your device just displays them — which means when the server goes away, so do your emails.
Before you change a single DNS record, configure your email client to connect to each mailbox via POP3 and download everything. Do this for every email address associated with the domain. Once you've confirmed that your emails are sitting safely on your local machine, you're ready to proceed.
DNS — Changing Your Name Servers
Your domain name is managed by a domain registrar (companies like GoDaddy, Netfleet, VentraIP, or Crazy Domains). Your website hosting is a separate service. DNS — the Domain Name System — is what connects your domain name to the server where your website actually lives.
To point your domain to your new host, you need to update the Name Servers (also written ns1 and ns2) in your domain registrar's control panel. Your new host will give you the correct name server values — they typically look something like ns1.newhost.com.au and ns2.newhost.com.au.
Log in to your domain registrar, find the DNS or Name Server settings, and update the values. DNS changes can take anywhere from a few minutes to 48 hours to propagate globally — this is called the TTL (Time To Live) period. During this window, some visitors may see your old site and some may see your new one, depending on which DNS servers their internet provider has cached.
Search Engine Visibility — Unblock Google
WordPress has a setting under Settings → Reading called "Discourage search engines from indexing this site." This is meant to be used during development, so you can build your site without Google indexing a half-finished version. But it's surprisingly common for this checkbox to get left ticked — and if it is, Google will stop crawling your entire site.
After migrating to your new host and confirming the site is live, log into your WordPress admin, navigate to Settings → Reading, and make sure that checkbox is unchecked. Also confirm in Google Search Console that your site is being crawled normally and that there are no coverage errors or noindex warnings affecting your key pages.
If you're doing a domain migration at the same time as a host migration, you'll also need to set up 301 redirects from your old URLs to the new ones — but that's a topic for another post. For a simple host migration with no domain change, these four steps will keep you covered.