SERVING: OCEAN SPRINGS · BILOXI · D'IBERVILLE · GULFPORT · PASCAGOULA
NO CONTRACTS · YOU OWN YOUR DOMAIN · (228) 282-0876
Rescue and migration
The vendor stopped answering. Nobody has the login. It breaks whenever anyone touches it, or it sits on a platform you pay for and cannot leave. A rescue rebuilds the whole thing on ground you control, keeps everything worth keeping, and hands you every key at the end.
The site is on their hosting, under their account, and the only person who knew the password is not calling back. Whether they moved on or simply got tired of a client who pays once a year makes no difference to you.
The platform will let you edit a heading and will not let you take the site with you. Your words and pictures sit inside somebody else's product and the exit on offer is copy and paste. That is a business model, not a technical limit.
Years of plugins, a theme customised by editing it directly, and an update nobody dares run. So nobody runs it, and every month it gets a month less safe. What finally takes it down is usually not an attacker, it is an expired certificate.
No page titles worth the name, one heading repeated everywhere, an address that changed years ago and never got redirected, and a Google listing pointing at a page that no longer resolves. Not a bad site. An invisible one, which is worse.
A layout from another decade, a phone rendering that is the desktop shrunk to thumbnail size, and a contact form that quietly stopped delivering, unnoticed, because enquiries simply stopped and that looked like the economy.
You send me the address. I open the site, read its source, run the speed and mobile checks, and look up publicly where it is hosted and who holds the domain. Twenty minutes, no charge, and you get the findings either way.
Before anything moves I record what the site is today: every page and its address, what each title says, how fast it loads, how it behaves on a phone. That is what the after gets compared against, so better is a measurement rather than a feeling.
Everything worth keeping gets listed, your words, photographs, service pages, forms, booking and review links, addresses. So does everything not worth keeping: the four abandoned pages, the plugin that only ever attracted spam. You approve both lists.
Rebuilt page for page on my platform. Same content, same structure, better bones. Not a redesign unless you ask for one, building like for like is what lets you compare it honestly, and stops anyone smuggling a new look past you inside a technical job.
Every old address is pointed at whatever replaced it. That is the difference between a customer's saved bookmark still working and that customer meeting an error page, and it is the single step most migrations skip.
The domain is pointed at the new site when nobody is looking. I watch it take effect, walk every redirect, check the forms genuinely deliver, and only then is the old thing retired. If anything is wrong we point it straight back. Nothing is deleted.
A domain is registered to a person or a company at a registrar, and that record is public. Look yourself up and you will usually find your own name on it, meaning whoever built the site only ever had the password, and the registrar has its own way of getting you back in. A vendor who registered it in their own name is a harder conversation, and I will help you have it.
Unlock the domain at the registrar it lives with, ask for the authorisation code, hand that to the registrar you are moving to. It takes a few days. There is a sixty-day lock after a transfer or a change of registrant, so if one just happened you wait it out. That is ICANN's rule and nobody can shorten it.
Moving a site only means changing where the domain POINTS, not who it lives with. That is one screen at your existing registrar and it is reversible in ten minutes, faster, cheaper and far less frightening than moving both at once.
Some platforms have no export worth the name. There is a boring answer that always works: the pages are public, so the words and the pictures can be taken off them and rebuilt by hand. Not clever, not quick, but it means no platform is ever really a locked door.
Plenty of sites are fine apart from an enormous homepage image, no page titles and a contact form going to an address nobody reads. That is an afternoon of work, and I would rather quote you the afternoon.
New name, new premises, a second location, a partner coming in. Rebuilding one to one now and rebuilding properly in four months is paying twice for one website. Wait, then do it once with the new facts in hand.
The site is fine and nobody rings. The reason is an unclaimed Google listing, or wrong hours sitting on three directories, or nothing at all where your customers actually look. I will say so, and none of that costs $2,500 to fix.
Quoted after we look, never before. Two rescues that look identical from outside can be a two-hour job and a two-week job. We find out what you actually own and put it in writing at no charge, and if yours is an afternoon, you will be told so.
Almost always, yes. The two things people assume they need him for usually do not need him at all: the domain is registered to you at a registrar with its own password reset, and the content is sitting on public pages where it can be taken from. The only thing genuinely out of reach is the old hosting account, and you are leaving that anyway.
No. The new site is finished and checked before anything points at it. The switch is one setting, changed at a quiet hour, and the old site stays where it is until the new one is proven. If something looks wrong we point it back.
That is what the redirects are for. Every address the old site had is pointed at the page that replaced it, so a link somebody saved, and a link a search engine already knows about, still lands somewhere real. What I will not do is promise you a position in a search result. Nobody honest can, and anyone who does is telling you something about themselves.
You do not have to, and you certainly do not have to do it yourself. If it is awkward, and it usually is, I will write the email or handle the handoff directly, professionally. Burning the bridge is satisfying for a day, and then you find you need one more file from them.
Read it before you move anything, and if there is a notice period, serve it. I am not a lawyer and will not pretend to be one on your website. What I will say is that an agreement about a service is a different thing from ownership of your domain and your words, and those two are exactly what people wrongly assume they signed away.
We will find out what you actually own, what can be moved and what has to be rebuilt, and put it in writing. That part costs nothing and is yours regardless of what you do next.
(228) 282-0876 · Ocean Springs, MS