Can we move website hosting without moving email and CRM?

Yes. A website can move to a new host while email, the CMS and CRM stay on their existing services, provided the domain routes are changed carefully. That is the approach we chose for Maetree’s move to Cloudflare.

Our launch planning raised a common concern: would changing the public website also disrupt the other systems using the same domain?

Start with a service map

The public website, an editor’s CMS, incoming email and the CRM serve different purposes. They may share a domain name without sharing a server or a deployment process.

For our own project, we treated the public website as one change. We kept the CMS and CRM on their separate service addresses and preserved the mail settings. The contact form still needs to reach its enquiry store, notification service and CRM, so those connections need their own checks.

This made the scope of the move easier to explain: publish the website without moving every other service at the same time.

Keep the old addresses useful

A migration also changes what visitors and search engines receive. We retained existing content addresses where practical and prepared permanent redirects for old archive addresses that now lead to Insights.

We selected one public website address, using HTTPS without www, and used it in canonical links and the sitemap. Staging remains excluded from indexing so a review copy does not become a competing public result.

Preserve a way back

Before switching traffic, we backed up the previous website’s files, database and server configuration. We also tested an isolated restore, including loading the restored homepage and an image.

A backup file and a working restore answer different questions. The first shows that a copy exists. The second gives evidence that it can still run. Neither replaces a clear record of which website route to reverse if launch checks fail.

Check the service boundary after launch

Our cutover checklist covers the public pages, redirects, contact form and sitemap, together with continued access to the CMS and CRM. Email routing must remain intact too. A successful homepage is only one part of that review.

The practical lesson from our project is to make the website move small enough to verify. Keep unrelated services in place, record the routes being changed and know how to return traffic to the previous site.

See how we review content before production and preserve submitted enquiries.