Advice for copying staging site to live site

  • Thank you in advance for reading this, and for any help you can offer!

    I am working on a fairly well established wordpress site, (300+ posts, lots of images) helping out the owner with a few things that she needs. She wants to make some changes to the site, get a new theme, remove/change pages and posts and generally make updates.

    She asked me to create a staging/beta site for her to work on while she is making these changes, so that it doesn’t disrupt the live site. To that end, I made a direct copy of her current site and database into a ‘Beta’ subdomain/folder. The current live site is going to stay online and continue to be updated. I already explained that if she makes new posts on the live site, she will have to make them on the beta site too, if she intends on eventually making the beta site go live.

    Here’s my question: When the time comes, what is the ‘cleanest’ way to transfer the entire staging site over to the live site, with as little down-time as possible.

    On the server (A Bluehost Shared server) I have two folders: her live folder, and a ‘beta’ folder. I also have two databases. The live and a ‘Beta’ database.

    This is the current method I am thinking of doing. Please feel free to suggest others or tell me if this won’t work. If you have any questions, i’ll try to clarify.

    On the server, create another empty database for the final site, copy the beta database to it, run SQL queries to find and replace URL’s. Rename the current live folder to a new name, and rename ‘Beta’ to the current live folder. Setup wp_config to point to the new database. This should, in theory, make the current domain point to the new site files and database.

    -Aaron

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  • I would recommend going the easy way: use a plugin.

    Try Duplicator plugin first; that’s the easiest. It creates a package and an installer; you’d upload those 2 files to the new sites and run the installer.

    If that doesn’t work out, then you can try WP Migrate DB (or its pro version). WP Migrate DB or WP Migrate DB Pro has the option to automatically search & replace all the URLs and file paths for you.

    Either of these would make moving WordPress much simpler than doing it manually.

    Thread Starter MelvinEnterprises

    (@melvinsoftware)

    I had heard of Duplicator once before, and used it on a client site in the past. I just wasn’t sure about it in this case because the uploads folder on the site is close to 2GB worth of data, mostly images.

    I hadn’t heard of the WP Migrate DB plugin though. I’ll take a look at both of them and see if they can help me.

    Thanks a bunch!

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