Migrating an eCommerce Site to Flywheel

Migrating an eCommerce site can seem like a daunting task even for seasoned developers, as there are some special considerations to account for to ensure orders don’t fall through the cracks. Never fear, our guide to migrating your eCommerce site to Flywheel will walk you through that process and have you up and running in no time!

Table of Contents:

1. Migrate your site to Flywheel
2. Test the migrated site
3. Disable order taking on the Live site
4. Perform a content refresh
5. Update your domain’s DNS records to point to Flywheel
6. Enable ordering on the Flywheel site only

Migrate your site to Flywheel

Visit our guide here for instructions on how to migrate your site to Flywheel with no fuss using our custom plugin Flywheel Migrations.

Or, let us do it for you! Click here, complete the form, and our team of seasoned pros will take care of the initial migration (you’ll still want to follow the rest of the steps below to ensure you don’t lose any orders, though).

Test the migrated site

Using the site’s temporary domain, view the site you just migrated. Make sure everything is working as you expect (cart, checkout, coupons, etc.). Having problems? Just reach out to our friendly happiness engineers for help!

Disable order taking on the Live site

Begin this step only when you’re ready to go live on Flywheel. You’ll want to let your customers know that ordering will be disabled for a bit while you transition your site over to Flywheel hosting.

You can either disable the ordering function specifically (check your eCommerce plugin documentation for more info), or you can put the entire site into maintenance mode using a plugin like CMP – Coming Soon & Maintenance Plugin or Coming Soon Page.

This step is vital to ensure customers don’t place orders on your old site during the transition period, as those orders may not get moved over.

Perform a content refresh

This step is essentially migrating the site over to Flywheel again. This will serve to include any orders that were created on the live site between the the first migration and the time you disabled orders.

Here’s where the plugin Flywheel Migrations makes things easy, or you can follow our Content Refresh Guide. Keep in mind, if you had to make any changes to your migrated site back in Step 2, you’ll want to reapply the changes manually after the content refresh is complete.

Change your domain’s DNS records to point to Flywheel

Visit your registrar’s Domain Manager and point your domain(s) to the Flywheel IP address, which can be found on the site’s dashboard on the sidebar.

Not quite sure how to change your domain’s DNS settings? Don’t worry, we offer generic and registrar-specific guides here.

Enable ordering on the Flywheel site only

As DNS propagates over the next few hours, your customers will start to see the Flywheel version of site when they visit your domain, hooray! It’s safe to enable ordering now, but make sure you do this on the Flywheel site only and not the original.