After migration homepage fails

I have a local Grav site running under MAMP Pro. The homepage is build using custom fields and uses it’s own page template.

Once I migrate the site to a remote server, the homepage fails, however all other pages and data within the other pages are coming up correctly.

What I mean with fails: The homepages has the default template allocated instead of the custom one. The fields are empty - all custom fields setup for the homepage lost their data. This means I have to repopulate the content for the page after migration.

This is highly annoying and I had the same issue on another occasion.

So I suppose my question is why is it just happening on the homepage not on the other pages? And are there any recommended migration steps to avoid issues like these?

Thanks