Easier Site Migrations: Avoiding DNS Problems with the hosts File

Over this past month, I’ve needed to migrate quite a few WordPress sites from one host to another. I can say with confidence: it’s still not my favorite process. There’s nothing that should be complex about it, but somehow there are enough moving parts that it’s never simple, and you feel on edge throughout. If you’ve ever put together a chair from Ikea, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Today, we’ll be looking at a specific source of complications in a WordPress site migration: Domain Name System (DNS) records. We’ll talk in depth about potential DNS pitfalls in a WordPress site migration, and introduce a very helpful way to step around many of them: the hosts file.

DNS: A Quick Rundown

DNS is a massive set of recorded associations between domain names and IP addresses.

To understand DNS, it’s helpful to reflect on a couple of things: