WordPress to AWS Migration

WordPress powers over 40% of the web, but many sites still run on shared hosting platforms that cannot handle traffic spikes, offer limited security controls, and provide no room for growth. Migrating your WordPress site to Amazon Web Services (AWS) unlocks the full potential of cloud infrastructure — elastic scalability, enterprise-grade security, global content delivery, and granular cost control. At SoniNow, we specialise in migrating WordPress sites of all sizes to AWS, from small blogs to enterprise WooCommerce stores handling millions in transactions.

Assessment and Planning

Before any migration begins, we conduct a thorough audit of your existing WordPress setup. This assessment phase identifies potential issues, documents your current configuration, and produces a detailed migration plan with a precise timeline.

Current Environment Audit

We document every aspect of your current WordPress installation: the web server (Apache or Nginx), PHP version and configuration, active plugins and themes, database size and table structure, media library size, and any custom code or third-party integrations. We also measure baseline performance metrics — page load time, Time to First Byte (TTFB), concurrent users, and peak traffic patterns.

Identifying Pain Points

Shared hosting environments come with well-known limitations — CPU throttling, memory caps, MySQL connection limits, and "unlimited" storage that is anything but. We catalog these bottlenecks and explain how each one will be resolved on AWS. For example, if your site currently hits a MySQL connection limit during traffic spikes, we will design an Amazon RDS database with appropriate connection pooling.

Migration Strategy Selection

Based on the audit, we choose the optimal migration approach:

• Minimal-downtime migration — For production sites that cannot tolerate extended outages. We replicate data in real-time and perform a final cutover measured in seconds.
• Clone and verify — For lower-traffic sites, we clone the site to AWS, validate everything in a staging environment, and then update DNS.
• Fresh build with import — For sites with accumulated cruft, outdated plugins, or security issues, we rebuild on AWS using the latest WordPress best practices and import only essential content and data.

Migration Process

Our migration process is designed for data integrity, security, and minimal disruption to your live site.

Database Migration

The WordPress database contains all content, user data, settings, and options. We export the database using mysqldump or WP-CLI, transfer it to AWS over an encrypted connection, and import it into the target Amazon RDS (MySQL or MariaDB) instance. We run wp search-replace to update all site URLs and serialised data paths to the new domain or staging URL. For large databases (1 GB+), we use chunked import techniques or AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to avoid timeout issues.

File and Media Transfer

WordPress media files (images, PDFs, videos) are transferred to Amazon S3 using a combination of rsync for the initial bulk transfer and S3 sync for incremental changes. We then configure the Offload Media plugin (such as WP Offload Media Lite or a custom solution) to serve media directly from S3 with CloudFront CDN. This offloads storage from the web server and dramatically improves page load times for media-heavy sites.

Plugin and Theme Compatibility

Before the cutover, we install and configure all plugins and themes on the AWS staging environment, testing for compatibility with the new stack. Common issues include plugins that hardcode file paths (update to new paths), caching plugins that need reconfiguration (object cache to Redis, page cache to Nginx FastCGI cache or CloudFront), and SMTP plugins that need new credentials for Amazon SES.

DNS Cutover

When the AWS environment is fully validated — all pages render correctly, forms submit, payments process — we perform the DNS cutover. We reduce the TTL on your DNS records to 60 seconds 24 hours before the migration, then point the A record or CNAME to the AWS CloudFront distribution or Application Load Balancer. For email delivery, we update MX records to route through Amazon SES.

Performance Optimisation

AWS provides the tools to make your WordPress site significantly faster than any shared hosting environment.

Caching Strategy

We implement a multi-layer caching approach: page caching with Nginx FastCGI Cache or a WordPress caching plugin, object caching with Amazon ElastiCache Redis (for database query results and fragments), and CDN caching with Amazon CloudFront for static assets and, optionally, full-page caching for anonymous visitors. Properly configured, this stack can serve cached pages in under 100 milliseconds.

Database Optimisation

Amazon RDS is tuned specifically for WordPress workloads: we set the correct innodb_buffer_pool_size (typically 70–80% of instance memory), enable query caching where appropriate, configure slow query logging, and schedule regular maintenance tasks like OPTIMIZE TABLE. For high-traffic sites, we add RDS read replicas to offload read queries.

Image and Asset Optimisation

Images account for the majority of page weight. We configure automated image compression (WebP conversion with AVIF fallback), lazy loading, and responsive image sizing. Combined with CloudFront CDN, image-heavy pages load 50–70% faster than on shared hosting.

Security Hardening

AWS offers security controls that are simply unavailable on shared hosting platforms.

Network Security

The WordPress web server runs in a private subnet with access restricted through Security Groups — only ports 80 and 443 are open (via the load balancer), and SSH access is available only through a bastion host or AWS Systems Manager Session Manager. The RDS database resides in an isolated subnet with no public IP address. AWS WAF protects against SQL injection, XSS, and DDoS attacks at the edge.

Automated Backups

We configure AWS Backup with daily snapshots of the RDS database and weekly AMI snapshots of the web server. Snapshots are retained for 30 days and replicated to a secondary region for disaster recovery. Application-level backups (wp-content files and database exports) are stored in S3 with versioning enabled.

SSL and HTTPS

All traffic is encrypted using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) with auto-renewing SSL/TLS certificates. HTTP traffic is automatically redirected to HTTPS at the load balancer level. HSTS headers are enabled to force modern browsers to always use HTTPS.

Cost Optimisation

AWS gives you control over what you spend. For a typical WordPress site, we recommend t3.medium or t3.large instances with Compute Savings Plans (saving up to 42% vs. On-Demand). Using S3 lifecycle policies to archive old backups to S3 Glacier and right-sizing RDS instances based on actual utilisation keeps monthly costs predictable.

Migrating your WordPress site to AWS with SoniNow means you finally leave behind shared hosting limitations and gain a cloud infrastructure that scales with your success.