Pressable is Automattic's host, so parts of your site are probably leaning on Jetpack rather than on anything in the database. Those are the parts a copy does not bring.
Files and database transfer cleanly. The features delivered as part of the platform have to be identified first and rebuilt deliberately.
Related posts, image CDN, search, social sharing and stats are commonly on by default. Each is a functional gap the moment the site is served elsewhere.
If images are served through Jetpack's CDN, every URL in your content points at a service tied to that plugin. Rewriting them is a migration step, not an afterthought.
Sites using it have no local search index at all. Turning the plugin off leaves the search box returning nothing, which nobody notices until a visitor does.
Publishing schedules and backups that ran on the platform need a home here, rather than falling back to cron that fires on visitor traffic.
Content is copied and verified on our side before anything changes, so the cutover is a DNS change rather than a rebuild in production.
A Pressable migration rarely goes wrong on the content. It goes wrong on the three things Jetpack was quietly providing that nobody had written down.
Features that were served by an external platform become your server's work. Whether that is faster or slower depends entirely on what replaced them.
These differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan, and each follows from features that were part of the platform rather than part of the site.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Jetpack module inventory | Enumerated before the move, each with a named replacement | Modules like related posts and social sharing are enabled by default and never documented, so their absence appears as unexplained missing functionality after cutover. |
| Image URLs | Rewritten from the external CDN back to local media | Content stored with CDN URLs keeps pointing at a service tied to a plugin the site no longer runs, which turns into broken images at an unpredictable later date. |
| Search | A local index built and verified before DNS moves | A site using hosted search has no local index whatsoever, so disabling the plugin leaves a search box that silently returns nothing. |
| Scheduled tasks | Moved onto the platform scheduler rather than visitor-triggered cron | Work that the previous platform ran for you has no home after the move, and falling back to WP-Cron makes scheduled publishing depend on traffic. |
| Cache rules | Rebuilt from observed behaviour rather than assumed defaults | Edge caching on a managed host is configured outside WordPress, so nothing in a files-and-database copy tells you what was being cached or for how long. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, every platform feature replaced deliberately, and downtime limited to the DNS switch.