Existing WordPress Live Installation to Sub Domain for Testing & Modifying

  • I’ve been on this for about 4 days straight now wanting to do something simple, however, this project hasn’t turned out to be simple, in fact very time consuming & complicated.

    I’ve created a new subdomain e.g. testsite.existingwebsite.com

    this new subdomain will house an exact copy/mirror image of my existing wordpress website to make changes, test, etc. (this is where I’m having the most difficulty with databases, copying, changing parameters etc.)

    block testsite.existingwebsite.com off from public view & search engines

    any changes, modifications, etc. will then be uploaded to the live site after changes are complete (best practices stuff)

    there has to be a simpler way to make this happen practically than the amount of time i’ve spent on this project & the countless resources & suggestions I’ve tried with.

    I’ve tried:

    wamp & xampp (near useless, difficult to setup & it’s confined to a local machine)

    microsoft webmatrix (a recommendation that simply turned out to be a bad idea, all types of crap installed onto my local machine & development environment is confined to local machine)

    sub folder testing environment suggestions & resources I’ve been through:

    wordpress codex
    source 1
    source 2
    source 3
    source 4
    source 5
    source 6
    source 7
    source 8 (this is the last one I tried before posting here)

    I’m sure this is not as difficult as I or my referring sources are making it out to be.

    I’m looking for someone that could help me see this project through so I can have a testing/stage site to make changes, test, etc. away from public view & upload changes when they’re ready, that’s all i’m trying to do.

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  • What I do is open a MySQL database dump exported from PHPmyAdmin in a text editor and search and replace

    replace existingwebsite.com
    with testsite.existingwebsite.com

    Then import that dump file into the new site’s empty database.

    Upload the entire WP folder from the existing site to the new site

    Edit the root folder htaccess file and wp-config.php file if needed

    There are sometimes a few issues that need to be manually updated due to serialized data in the database getting messed up from the change in length of the domain name. There are some automated ways to move the file but they all report a list of gotchas to watch for.

    I just do it this way. I usually have to copy and paste content from text widgets into the new site. I have to copy and paste form data from some forms plugins.

    That’s about all that’s needed.

    Having done many of these by now it takes me about 30 minutes from creating the new subdomain, database, database user, exporting and editing the dump file, importing the dump file, making these changes.

    There are other, similar methods, and some refinements, that work and perhaps make the process a bit more automated. This one works well for me. If I was moving five or ten sites a week I’d look into more automated methods.

    As far as “out of public view”, under Settings / Privacy, set the site to not be indexed by search engines. If you REALLY don’t want anyone finding it, there are plugins that require you be logged in before you can see anything on the site.

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