Moving your site away from SMILE to another provider doesn’t have to be awkward. This article sets out our process and expectations so that you can go into a migration prepared.
The Request Date
The “Request Date” will be considered the date in which you made a formal request to leave SMILE services, unless your account balance is not cleared. If your account balance is not cleared then the Request Date will be considered the date that your account balance was cleared after the request was made.
Timing
To ensure that you suffer minimal downtime for your website, we suggest that you leave enough time to make a smooth transition. We recommend 2 months as a minimum.
In order to begin a migration, you should expect your migration package to be delivered within two working weeks of your Request Date.
Migration Package
After your account balance is cleared in full, you will be provided with a database dump, folders with your respective theme(s) and your uploads folder – we refer to this as the “migration package”. This means that some installation and configuration will be required to get your site up and running on your new host. We do not offer migration support, so it’s important to make sure that you’ve either arranged some additional support from SMILE or another party.
We will prepare and send only one Migration Package. Subsequent Migration Packages will be charged at ÂŁ1000 ex VAT.
Database
Your site(s) will be coming from a multisite installation. This means your site(s) database tables will be prefixed with a Site ID.
Either way, you will not be given a full WordPress database and you should overwrite or insert tables that you are given into a new host database.
If you are migrating into another multisite: You will need to ensure that these are not duplicates of any existing sites in the multisite you are migrating into. If they are, you should start a new site (or sites) and make a note of their ID(s) as you will need to modify the database tables and manually change the Site ID in order to overwrite the new site tables.
If you are migrating into a single site instance: You will need to remove the Site ID prefix from tables that have it.
Users
We do not provide the users table. We encourage our clients to use single sign on wherever possible so that the user credentials and authentication process is handled outside of WordPress. if you have single sign on enabled, then you do not need to worry about importing users.
If you have a small amount of users on your site, then it will be easier to recreate them in your new site(s).
If you are managing a large number of users, then you may request a CSV of your users details from wp_users and wp_usermeta. NB: User passwords are stored in a hashed format.
Uploads
You may have been expecting a full home directory in your migration files, but we do not provide this due to specialised WP configs and reliance on environmental variables. Instead we will provide you with your uploads folder. You should copy the year/month folders into the relevant place in your new instance(s). Along with the database import, your media library will remain in-tact.
Theme
Your theme will be provided as a zip file. You can install this via the GUI, or upload the unzipped version into the themes folder of your new instance.
Plugins
We do not provide any plugin files as part of our migration packages. Instead, our themes include something called TGMPA, which means that a list of plugins is built into your theme and shows where the plugin can be obtained from. Where the plugin is available through the WordPress Plugins Repository, these plugins can be installed in one click. TGMPA will show you the recommended, required and inactive plugins for your theme to run smoothly.
Premium Plugins
We sometimes choose to work with plugins that require a commercial license in order to continue using. These are referred to as “Premium Plugins”. The license fees are covered with any Support, Hosting and Maintenance package at SMILE, but without this, you must licence and obtain this software yourself. For example: Gravity Forms is a premium plugin, and you can obtain a copy from https://www.gravityforms.com/ where licences start from $59 per year.
1st Party Microservices
Some SMILE products rely on microservices to enhance the experience. For example, Ping Pong (a SMILE microservice that powers real-time chat functionality) enhances chat functionality in a number of our products, by removing the need to refresh a page to see responses to questions.
You will not receive 1st Party Microservices as part of any Migration Package, and would need to source an alternative solution.
3rd Party Microservices and API Keys
We may use Microservices and APIs from 3rd party vendors. If SMILE holds the API key or license to a 3rd Party Microservice, you can expect that these will be revoked, and that this linked functionality in your site may stop working until you replace the key or license.