Backing Up and Migrating Chat Data

Your conversations live in custom database tables — not in WordPress posts. That’s what makes the chat fast, but it has one consequence you should know about before you migrate, restore, or clean up your site: tools that only handle “content” will not carry your chat history with them.

Where the data lives

Super Speedy Chat stores everything in five custom tables (with your site’s table prefix, usually wp_):

Table	Contains
wp_ssc_conversations	One row per conversation: status, visitor info (name, email, IP, user agent), assignment, timestamps.
wp_ssc_participants	Who’s in each conversation (visitor, admins, bot) and their display names.
wp_ssc_messages	Every message.
wp_ssc_canned_responses	Your saved canned responses.
wp_ssc_discord_threads	The mapping between conversations and Discord threads.

Settings live in three options in the standard wp_options table: ssc_options (all plugin settings), ssc_customizer (appearance), and ssc_db_version. Your license key is stored separately in superspeedy_options (shared by all Super Speedy plugins).

What’s safe and what isn’t

✅ Full-database backups carry everything. Anything that dumps the whole database — your host’s backup, mysqldump, or backup plugins in full-database mode — includes the ssc_* tables automatically, because they’re ordinary tables in the same database.

⚠️ Content exports do NOT include chat. The built-in WordPress export (Tools > Export / WXR files) only covers posts, pages and other post types — chat history, canned responses and settings are not in it. The same goes for any migration plugin configured to copy “content only” or a hand-picked list of core tables.

⚠️ Deleting the plugin erases everything. Deactivating Super Speedy Chat keeps all data. But clicking Delete on the Plugins screen runs the uninstaller, which drops all five tables and removes the settings. If there’s any chance you’ll want the history later, back up first.

Backing up just the chat tables

A targeted dump of the chat tables (adjust the prefix and credentials):

mysqldump -u DB_USER -p DB_NAME \
  wp_ssc_conversations wp_ssc_participants wp_ssc_messages \
  wp_ssc_canned_responses wp_ssc_discord_threads \
  > ssc-chat-backup.sql

Restore with:

mysql -u DB_USER -p DB_NAME < ssc-chat-backup.sql

Migrating to a new site or host

1. Use a full-database migration (or include the five ssc_* tables explicitly if your tool lets you pick tables). All-in-one migration plugins that copy the entire database are fine.
2. Copy the plugin as part of your files, or reinstall and re-activate it on the new site — activation recreates the speed-boosting mu-plugin (wp-content/mu-plugins/ssc-fast-ajax.php) automatically, so you don’t need to copy mu-plugins by hand.
3. Re-enter or verify your license on the new domain under the Super Speedy menu (licenses are checked per-domain — see Installing Your License, Activation and Updates).
4. If you use Discord, update the companion bot’s configuration if your site URL changed, since it posts back to your site’s REST endpoint.

Two small notes on visitor continuity: visitor identity is a cookie tied to your domain, so on the same domain returning visitors resume their conversations after a migration; if the domain changes, visitors start fresh conversations (history is still in your admin). Messages are stored as plain text, so search-replace tools used during migration won’t corrupt them.

Cleaning up old conversations

There’s currently no built-in auto-purge. If you want to trim old closed conversations for GDPR or housekeeping reasons, see the retention section of the Privacy and Data Handling guide before deleting rows by hand — conversations, participants and messages reference each other by ID.