On Cloudways much of the tuning sits on the server rather than in the site. Varnish rules, PHP settings and cron are configured in the panel, and none of that appears in a WordPress backup.
A server you configured through a panel holds settings your WordPress install has never heard of.
The URLs you told Varnish never to cache — baskets, checkouts, account pages — are configured in the panel. We take that list and reproduce it in our cache rules before the move rather than rediscovering it from a support ticket afterwards.
Their caching plugin is paired with the server layer. It comes out and our cache takes over, which means checking whether anything in your theme had come to depend on its specific behaviour.
PHP version and limits, MySQL tuning and cron entries were all set in the panel. Those get captured and applied here explicitly instead of quietly reverting to a default.
Certificates issued through their panel do not travel. New ones are issued here and validated before DNS moves, so there is no window where the site is reachable without one.
Cloudways servers frequently carry more than one application. We establish which are still live before anything gets decommissioned.
The site copy is the straightforward half. Capturing what was configured on the server is the part that decides whether the migrated site behaves the same.
A migrated site with the wrong cache exclusions is either caching things it must not or caching nothing at all. Both show up immediately.
These are the specific things a Cloudways site needs attention on, and most of them are server-side rather than in WordPress.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Varnish exclusion list | Copied from the panel and reproduced in our cache rules | An exclusion list built up over time is not in the site, and losing it means caching a checkout page on the first day. |
| Breeze | Removed, with theme dependencies on its behaviour checked first | A plugin paired with a server-side cache sometimes gets relied on for things that have nothing to do with caching at all. |
| PHP and MySQL settings | Captured from the panel and applied here explicitly | Panel-level tuning is invisible to a site backup, so a migrated site silently reverts to defaults it had outgrown. |
| SSL certificates | Re-issued and validated before the DNS change | Certificates issued at application level on another platform do not transfer, and an unsecured window at cutover is the gap nobody plans for. |
| Application inventory | Every application on the server listed before decommissioning | One server often runs several sites, and only some of them are the one anybody was thinking about. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, cache exclusions verified before cutover, and certificates issued in advance.