Migration, Import, Export, and Cutover

Step 1: Inventory Before Moving
Open the migration and cutover tools only after inventorying pages, templates, global styles, custom fields, menus, forms, media, redirects, SEO metadata, commerce data, users, and addon dependencies. Record the source and target versions. A migration is more than copying page HTML.

Step 2: Export a Guarded Bundle
Export the supported Builder bundle and keep its manifest and checksum with the recovery record. Do not place credentials, private customer records, payment secrets, or unrelated uploads in a portable design package. When a script will run through WP CLI eval-file, avoid first-statement assumptions and preserve every host and dry-run guard.

Step 3: Import Without Replacing by Accident
Choose style-only, merge, or explicit layout replacement according to the migration plan. Verify the import target and expected current hash before the first write. Preserve stable element identifiers, parent relationships, extension data, and non-pack global tokens unless replacement was approved.

Step 4: Validate Then Cut Over
Check block counts, unique identifiers, parent and slot graphs, media URLs, forms, menus, responsive layout, Studio parity, public pages, SEO output, and logs before changing traffic. After cutover, verify redirects, canonical host, sitemap, cache, SSL, checkout bypasses, and the exact rollback path while the recovery window is still open.
