What Went Wrong
Client's WordPress site had outgrown their GoDaddy shared hosting plan. They were experiencing daily 503 errors during traffic spikes, their page load times averaged 6.8 seconds, and they had been hacked twice in the past year due to shared hosting vulnerabilities.
The site had 4,200 posts, 18,000 media files, a custom theme, 23 active plugins, and a complex .htaccess configuration. They needed the migration done over a weekend with absolutely zero downtime — their ad revenue depended on uninterrupted traffic.
What We Found
Audited the current setup and identified several migration challenges:
- Custom .htaccess rules that needed conversion to WP Engine's nginx config
- 3 plugins that relied on server-specific paths (not portable)
- Database contained 450MB of post revision and transient data that could be cleaned
- Media library had 2,300 orphaned files not attached to any post
- Two plugins were known incompatible with WP Engine's platform
How We Fixed It
1. Pre-migration cleanup: removed 450MB of revisions/transients, 2,300 orphaned media files, and optimized database tables — reducing total site size by 40%
2. Set up WP Engine staging environment and performed full migration using WP-CLI export/import for database and rsync for files
3. Converted .htaccess redirect rules to WP Engine's nginx format — 47 rules translated
4. Replaced incompatible plugins with WP Engine-compatible alternatives
5. Updated hardcoded server paths in 3 plugins
6. Tested every page type, form, and interactive element on staging
7. DNS migration: lowered TTL to 300 seconds 48 hours before, then switched A record during lowest traffic window (3 AM Sunday)
8. Monitored both old and new servers for 24 hours post-migration, old server configured as fallback
Outcome
Migration completed with zero downtime. DNS propagation was seamless due to the pre-lowered TTL. Page load time dropped from 6.8 seconds to 1.4 seconds — a 79% improvement.
The client has had zero security incidents in the 8 months since migration, and their hosting costs actually decreased by $40/month due to the database cleanup reducing their WP Engine plan tier.