I’ve recently used Shipper to migrate several subsites out of multisite networks as single sites, and wanted to share some quick feedback, since I probably won’t need to do it again for a long while. The TL;DR is that it worked but only with a *lot* of post-migration fixing:
– The API migration only worked as an export. When I went to the clean install to try to import, it never could find any of the subsites on the source site. Might be Cloudflare issue but the migration went fine as an export without disabling Cloudflare.
– It moves the entire uploads folder. I now have to write a custom script that will find all the files in the uploads folder that are not in the media library and delete them, because Shipper moved hundreds of megabytes of uploads that did not belong to the subsite.
– On one site there was some weird issue with the database and it refused to migrate a subsite into a single site where both sites were hosted on WPMUDEV. There was no error visible about this, it just stopped, and after three days of trying I had to open a ticket about it to have WPMUDEV migrate it for me. The agent said Shipper is not recommended for migrations between WPMUDEV sites, which implies there’s some sort of technical issue, which if true seems like something it should inform about in the pre-flight check.
– It does not remove the subsite ID from the media paths in the database, so many images were broken because their URLs still included “/uploads/sites/2/2020/…” instead of “/uploads/2020/…”. For every site, I had to use the Better Search & Replace plugin to replace “/uploads/sites/{siteID}/” with “/uploads/”, after which the images worked.
– I’m not sure what the issue was with this, since the domains weren’t even the same, but for every site, I had to use an incognito window to log in after the migration. There was just an infinite login loop in my main browser window, with no login errors, suggesting some issue with cookies? Maybe an issue with the Hub SSO, or Defender’s login masking? It never worked when I went directly to the login page after disabling Defender either though, except in incognito.
– Incidentally on every site I had to go into the files and rename Defender’s folder to disable it in order to log in. Same with Wordfence if it was installed. Aside from the login issue above there seems to be something else at play with security plugins. Perhaps it should auto-deactivate security plugins on the destination site during the migration.
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I’m happily done migrating things with Shipper for a while so I’m just dropping this as “to whom it may concern” info. Hope some of it is helpful. Cheers.
