Leave WordPress without breaking my email or losing my site

Leaving Squarespace means dealing with one company. Leaving WordPress usually means dealing with three or four, and most people don't know which does what until something breaks.

A typical WordPress setup looks like this:

• Someone holds your address. The company you bought yourbusiness.com from, and who bills you to renew it. Often GoDaddy, Namecheap or 123-reg.
• Someone runs the website. The company whose computers your pages actually sit on. Often SiteGround, Bluehost, WP Engine or a local web firm.
• Someone runs your email. Sometimes Google or Microsoft. Sometimes, and this is the risky one, the same company that runs the website.
• Someone bills you for add-ons. The plugins and the theme, each renewing on its own quiet annual schedule.

They arrive as separate bills from separate companies, which is the good news and the bad news at once. Nothing is tangled together the way it is at Squarespace. But nobody is holding the whole picture for you either.

First, work out which WordPress you have

There are two things both called WordPress and they leave very differently.

The hosted kind is managed at wordpress.com. Your domain and your email may be bundled into that subscription, which makes it behave much more like Leave Squarespace without breaking my domain or email, and the same rule applies: cancel the website plan, never the whole account.

The self-hosted kind is the far more common one for a business. You sign in at your own address, usually ending /wp-admin, and you pay a separate company to host it. This is the version the rest of this page is about.

Then find out where your email actually lives

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that causes real damage.

On a bundled platform your email is a separate subscription that survives when the website goes. On self-hosted WordPress, your mailboxes may be sitting on the same server as the website. Cancel the hosting and the email goes with it, along with anything still in it.

Here is how to tell, in about a minute:

• You read your mail at Gmail or Outlook. Your email is with Google or Microsoft, quite separate from the host. This is the comfortable case.
• You read your mail at a webmail page belonging to your host, something like webmail.yourbusiness.com or a link inside your hosting control panel. Your email is on the hosting server. Move it to a proper email provider before you cancel anything, and treat that as its own small project.
• You are genuinely not sure. Look at where your mail app connects, or ask whoever set it up. Do not guess.

Watch out for who is running your DNS

Your domain's settings, its DNS, are the switchboard that sends visitors to your website and messages to your email. Usually they live at your registrar.

But WordPress hosts very often ask you to point your nameservers at them when you sign up, which quietly moves the whole switchboard to the host. If that happened, your DNS is at your hosting company, and ending the hosting can take your DNS down with it, which stops both your website and your email even though neither was on that server.

Before you change anything, find out which company answers for your domain, and take screenshots of every existing entry. Two minutes now, and you can always put things back exactly as they were.

The rule that keeps you safe is the same one that applies everywhere:

• Only add the records you are shown.
• Don't delete MX records. They carry your email.
• Don't delete email-related TXT records.
• Don't change your nameservers as part of this ordinary connection. Moving the whole DNS service is a separate job that needs a complete record inventory.

The safe order

1. Your new site comes first

Your bernard site is built and viewable on its own temporary address before you touch anything. Click around it. Check the pages you care about are there and read properly. If you had drafts and half-finished pages in WordPress, it is worth knowing what happened to them (What happens to my unpublished or draft pages when I move?).

Don't cancel anything yet.

2. Take a full backup of the old site

Do this while the old site is still running, not after. Download the files and the database, or use whatever backup export your host provides, and keep the copy somewhere that is not the server you are about to switch off.

This matters more than it does on a bundled platform. Cancelling hosting can delete the site permanently, rather than just taking it offline, and there is often no way back.

3. Sort the email out, if it needs sorting

If the check above said your mailboxes live on the hosting server, move them first, and let them settle. Do not run an email move and a website move in the same week.

If your email is already with Google or Microsoft, there is nothing to do. Leave it completely alone.

4. Connect the domain

In bernard, open your site and go to Custom domain. You are shown the exact records to add, already filled in with your own values, along with instructions for the screens you will be looking at. The full walkthrough is in Connect my own web address (domain) to my site.

You add those records wherever your DNS actually lives, which after the step above you now know. Bernard checks for them and makes the switch itself once they are in place, so there is no moment you have to catch.

For a while afterwards some visitors see the old site and some the new one. That is normal, it is the internet catching up, and it settles within a few hours.

5. Test properly before you cancel anything

• yourbusiness.com and www.yourbusiness.com
• Your contact form
• Sending an email from your business address
• Receiving an email at your business address
• Replying to an email, which is the one that catches sending problems
• Any booking, shop or payment pages

Keep the WordPress site running until every one of these works.

6. Cancel, in this order

Once the new site has been live and tested for a week or two:

1. The hosting plan. This is the one you are actually leaving. Check your backup is safe first.
2. Plugin and theme licences. These renew annually and quietly, and they are the ones people forget for years. Look through your card statement for names you no longer recognise.

And be careful not to cancel:

• The domain registration, which keeps your address yours
• Any email subscription
• Anything at all until the backup is somewhere safe

Hosting is usually paid a year in advance, so there is rarely a rush. Letting it run to its renewal date costs nothing extra and gives you a long, calm window in which the old site still exists if you need to look something up.

If your site was more than pages

Courses built with LearnDash have their own route across, with the modules, lessons and worksheets rebuilt rather than re-typed (Move my courses off LearnDash or WordPress). Worth reading before you start, because it changes what you need to export while the old site is still running.

So the sensible order is: new site ready, take a backup, check the email, add the records, test everything, then cancel the hosting and the licences.

And the two rules that matter most: find out where your email lives before you cancel anything, and do not change nameservers as part of an ordinary site connection.