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Post title pretty much says it all. I work for a company whose website on WordPress was built about 10 years ago. The people who built the website also host it and have a contract to do admin and updates. But they’re super oppositional and pretend to do more than they do. For example, they miss basic plug in updates. Their “service” is a sham. We need to move but I’m afraid of everything going wrong. The whole business runs from this website. How do we smoothly change Admins without them sabotaging us? Where do I find a new company to help us? I don’t want to get ripped off again.
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Honestly, if you need the process to go smoothly, you’re best off investing in a new developer or hosting service who can be relied upon to seamlessly migrate the site to a new hosting environment, set up a new admin, and delete the original admin.
Not to piss on your goal here but the fact you’re here asking this means you don’t have the technical know-how to do this yourself, and even if someone explains it to you, there’s a very high risk of something going wrong.
If you’d like to talk migration/hosting services, feel free to DM me, but otherwise I’d review and get in touch with some smaller, customer-service focused hosting companies who are able to do all this for you 🙂
Any skilled developer can take an existing site and move it somewhere else.
Where you might have issues is the domain name. Who owns it? Who has access to it?
You hire a more reliable development firm and have them develop the new site from scratch, from the basement up, to be hosted by a proper hosting company. Appoint someone in your company with half a nouse to oversee both. When your firm is satisfied the new site is ready, your supervisor does a DNS switchover with your registrar to the new site and it will go live. You’ll probably want to look at SSL and other stuff as well, but that’s the basics. Your old contractors should be bypassed, unless you were dumb enough to let them own the actual domain name.
In essence, your best move will be:
– Look for a new developer/ agency
– Set up new hosting in your company
– Instruct new developer to take a back-up of current site and move it to new hosting
– Remove old developers login details
– Test everything on new hosting
– Once you’re happy, repoint domain to new hosting space
The only bit that might be tricky is repointing the domain unless you have full control over it.
The three things you need to look into are i) domain, ii) hosting, iii) website access.
The domain lives on your registrar, and it points to your host through ‘name servers’. The host then hosts all of the files and databases that make up your WordPress website.
If you have access to the registrar, you can point your domain to any host you want. However, if you don’t have access to the host or to the website itself, you may not be able to take a backup of the site, meaning once you point the domain to a new host, you need to start from scratch.
If you have access to the host and/or the website, take a backup of the files + databases (google WordPress backup plugin) and then you can point the domain to a new host and migrate the backup over to the new host.
If you have access to the host and/or the website but you don’t have access to the domain via your registrar, you can still take the backup of the website but you will need to purchase a new domain name to migrate it.
If you’re changing the name servers from your registrar to a new server (aka new host) there will be down time while the changes propagate. If no one in your company has experience doing this, make sure you hire someone that knows what they’re doing to minimize downtime and any issues during the migration process.
Only once you have a complete backup of your website, and it is pointing to a new server/host that the current admin company does not have access to, then it is safe to exit the relationship with the company.
If any of this sounds confusing, research each term that you don’t understand before making any irreversible decisions.
Does your company own the domain and have access to it? I assume you do, because it would not be smart if you don’t.
Having said that, your best bet is to get a new host, migrate the entire site there to a staging site. Some hosts will even offer to do that for free. After migration make sure your site works then point your domain to the new host and go live.
If you need me to do that, PM me.