Free migration is not a migration promise

A customer leaving another host doesn't buy your servers first. They buy the move. Before they compare plans, they need to believe their live site, their email and their DNS will get from there to here without a bad evening. For that person, the page that explains migration is the real sales page. "Free migration" on a pricing card doesn't do that job. Free tells them what it costs. It says nothing about what happens.

So here is the position. A migration promise is a sequence, not a price. Show the order of events, who does each step, what the customer will notice and what happens if it goes wrong. A host that does this has written the page the switcher is actually reading. A host that doesn't is selling a badge.

Why switching customers hesitate

The person on your migration page has often moved a site before, and remembers the parts that went wrong: the email that vanished for a day, or the support ticket nobody owned once the site was half on one server and half on another.

That means your switcher arrives with a memory, not optimism. They aren't wondering whether you're fast. Every host says it's fast. They're wondering whether you'll still be answering once their site is half on your servers and half on someone else's.

So the page has two jobs: say exactly what support covers during the move, and say what happens if something goes wrong.

What "free migration" leaves out

Free is a fine answer to a question nobody leaving a host is asking first. These are the ones they are asking:

• Who does the moving, me or you?
• Does email come across, or just the website?
• When does the site actually start loading from your servers?
• What do I have to touch, and when?
• What happens if something breaks halfway?
• When can I cancel the old host?

"Free" answers none of them. Neither does "zero downtime", which is a claim, not a plan.

Show the order of events

A migration is a sequence the host knows by heart and the customer meets once every few years. The fix is to hand over the sequence. Before the switch: what gets copied, and where the customer can check the copy works before anything changes. The switch itself: the DNS change, and roughly how long it takes to settle. After: what stays running, and for how long.

This is also where the search worry gets answered, and it's a real worry for anyone whose site brings in leads. Google's own guidance on moving a site to new hosting without changing URLs is calm and specific. It suggests lowering the DNS TTL to a few hours at least a week ahead. It says a temporary drop in crawl rate straight after the move is normal, followed by a steady increase over the next few days. And it says to shut down the old hosting only once traffic to it has reached zero.

A host that puts those three points on its migration page, in plain words, has answered the fear with something the customer can check. That beats a reassuring adjective every time.

Say what the customer has to do

Most of the dread sits in the step the customer owns, because that's the one they can get wrong. Name it. If they need to change nameservers, say which ones, when, and that you'll tell them when it's time. If they need to hand over login details for the old host, say why and what you'll do with them. If they don't need to do anything, say that, and say it early.

A list of what the customer does is short. Keeping it short, and visible, is most of the reassurance.

Put the rollback on the page

Hosts tend to keep failure off their sales pages. The switcher has already imagined it anyway. Saying that the old site stays live until both sides have checked the new one, and that pointing DNS back is the plan if something is wrong, answers the question the switcher is actually asking. Another speed chart doesn't.

The most reassuring sentence a host can write admits the risk, then removes it.

Where the migration promise belongs

Not in a help article linked from the footer. The switcher meets your migration promise on the plan pages, in the checkout, and in the first email after they sign up. It should read the same in all three places, and the steps should match what support actually does. A page that promises one sequence while support runs another is worse than no page at all, because now the regret has a screenshot.

We say on our hosting page that the migration journey is the real sales page, and we mean it literally. Plans get you onto the shortlist. The move is what the customer is actually deciding about. If you'd like to know how yours reads to someone leaving a competitor, a free UX audit is a sensible first look.