Migration & Launch Service

At this time the service only supports WordPress-to-WordPress migrations. 

We strongly advise against weekend launches, as they tend to be less successful for several key reasons.

• Lower traffic levels on weekends can obscure performance issues. For instance, a Saturday launch might appear fine but could reveal problems by Monday morning when traffic increases. We recommend launching with typical traffic, so we can monitor for issues effectively.
• We recommend launching Monday to Thursday, 09:00 – 23:00 UTC, for optimal support coverage. This ensures our team is available to quickly address any issues that may arise during the launch, and throughout the subsequent business day. Outside this window, staff availability is reduced.

Your primary contact during the launch will be your Technical Account Manager (TAM). While TAMs can assist with many issues, they are not Support Engineers.

For complex technical challenges requiring engineering expertise, please submit an urgent support ticket. To ensure quick resolutions, follow the designated support channels and provide detailed information when submitting urgent tickets.

No. The customer’s development team or agency partner is responsible for bug fixes and site updates post-launch.

This service is focused on delivering customer applications in an accurate and timely manner. WordPress VIP can not accommodate revamps to the site mid-migration, and customers are responsible for unrelated fixes unearthed during QA.

To proceed with the Migration & Launch Service, your site’s themes and plugins must be compatible with the VIP File System.

Media files uploaded to a WordPress site on the VIP Platform are not stored in a filesystem local to the web container. Instead, an API stores the uploaded files in a separate read-only service called the VIP File System, an external, globally distributed object store. 

PHPCS (PHP Code Sniffer) provides a convenient way to assess plugin and theme compatibility and should be run across your codebase to help surface and address business-critical themes and plugins that may otherwise not work as expected post-migration.

In addition, VIP provides out-of-the-box security and performance features that mitigate the need for third-party plugins that add similar functionality. This includes caching plugins (such as WP Rocket and w3 Total Cache), image optimization plugins (such as Smush), and security plugins (such as Sucuri and WordFence). Our documentation lists known plugin incompatibilities.

The /tmp directory is the only fully writeable path on an application’s web servers. Plugins that attempt to write to any other directory may not work as expected. Plugin operations that expect media files to be stored locally and to have write permissions within uploads/, akin to an entirely local filesystem, may not work as expected. Required write permissions have been observed in plugins such as Contact Form 7 and TablePress. You might need to work with your team on a workaround for those situations.