Best way to apply test site changes to live site on installation with 4k posts!

  • Hello,

    I’ve been developing an updated version of our site on a test domain. I copied all of the files and database over to the test domain and have been working on setting up a new theme/child theme and testing plugin updates etc.

    The problem I have, is that both the test and live sites are substantial – almost 4k posts on the live site and 3.8k on the test – this difference is obviously from the posts that have been written since I copied over the original data around 6 weeks ago.

    We also have around 8gb of images in the uploads folder on the live site.

    What would be the best way of applying these changes to the live site, as effectively the sites are in two different states and I’m worried that simply importing the changed posts to the test site will miss any changes that have been made to posts outside of the date range.

    Would appreciate any advice as I want as little downtime as possible.

    Thanks, James

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    Are you going to be transferring the post data? It’s usually just updating files. E.g. re-uploading the theme’s folder under “/wp-content/themes/” folder

    Thread Starter wedideas

    (@wedideas)

    Hi Andrew,

    I’m not sure as the new theme has different size thumbnails that would need to be rebuilt and I don’t fancy doing this on the live site en-masse.

    I’ve also made some changes to some page content, along with updating several plugins on the test site. Is it possible that updating them on the live site could cause problems even though they were fine when I updated them on the test site?

    Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    You can use a thumbnail regenerator plugin by the way.

    Yes there’s always a risk that the live site will still break, despite how similar your testing environment is. Make sure you have a working backup that you can deploy if all goes wrong.

    Thread Starter wedideas

    (@wedideas)

    Hi Andrew, I’m using a thumbnail regeneration plugin already, but seeing as we have 10,000+ images it’s going to take quite a while ??

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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