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Migrating from WP Engine to Pressable? Avoid This Potential Pitfall

Larry Brouwer

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A bearded man in a bright blue shirt stands against a turquoise background, holding a laptop with one hand while typing with the other. He wears black-framed glasses and looks to the side with a thoughtful expression.

We continually looking for ways to optimize our clients’ WordPress website performance. Recently, we’ve been helping several clients switch from WP Engine to Pressable, a platform known for its speed, reliability, and excellent support. While Pressable’s Automated Migration tool typically makes these migrations a breeze, we hit a snag during a recent project, and we want to share our experience so you can avoid the same hurdle.

Pressable’s Automated Migration tool, powered by BlogVault, is usually incredibly efficient. The process is straightforward: download, install, and activate the “Pressable Automated Migration” plugin on the website you’re moving. Then, follow Pressable’s clear instructions, entering the Destination URL, SFTP User, and SFTP Password into the plugin and clicking “Migrate”. The migration runs smoothly in most cases, and the site is transferred without a hitch.

However, this time, things didn’t go as planned. After clicking the “Migrate” button, we received an error message: “Our requests are getting blocked at your source site.”

A red-bordered message box displaying the text: Our requests are getting blocked at your source site https://www.[redacted].com.

Our first thought was that Cloudflare might be interfering. Since we were using Cloudflare for this site, we disabled the proxy and tried the migration again. Unfortunately, the same error popped up. We then suspected Wordfence, so we disabled it and attempted the migration again. Still, no luck. We were still seeing the dreaded “Our requests are getting blocked at your source site” message.

Frustration was setting in. At this point, we suspected the issue might be related to WP Engine’s own infrastructure – perhaps their firewall or caching mechanisms were the culprits. So, we took a different approach: we created a copy of the website from the production environment to WP Engine’s staging environment. (WP Engine’s staging and development environments don’t have the same caching or advanced networking features as their production environments.)

We tried the migration once more from the staging environment, and it worked! The migration was completed without any issues.

The takeaway? If you’re encountering roadblocks with Pressable’s Automated Migration Tool when migrating from WP Engine, try migrating from a copy of your site on a WP Engine staging or development instance. This simple workaround can save you a lot of time and frustration.

We hope this insight helps you navigate your WordPress migrations with greater ease! If you’re looking for help in migrating your website, we are here to help. Just get in touch!