It Just Works! (Sighs in relief…)

Having been through the staging and migrating ringer this last week it was refreshing to install a plugin, connect two sites and watch as one was copied to another, no fuss, no errors, just copied and working.

The caveat is, this plugin is all but useless if you don’t buy a subscription*, but nothing else, free or paid for has worked with such ease. I moved my hosting from WP Engine (too expensive) to my own servers on Azure and AWS. I wanted to keep some of the functionality of WP Engine so have been looking for a reliable staging plugin amongst other things.

Manually moving a database to a staging domain is too much stress, so I tried paid versions of Revmakx’s staging tool in InfiniteWP (too many options and it just 500 Errors everything it touches), All in One WP Migrate (Paid $165 for Unlimited and OneDrive plugins, got a crash, a hang, something not copied, 8 hours wasted, refund), Duplicator (Free, just couldn’t make it work), looked at WP Staging but it stages to the same database, no thanks and finally restoring backups etc. or anything else that looked possible. Nothing worked.

Finally, I went back to the first thing I looked at, WP Migrate DB Pro. I had passed it up as at $249 / year for a dev license it is pricey. But my god, it’s good. Slick as a goose fat sandwich in a pool of bacon lard. It’ll save me hours in creating staging sites and moving them live and back again.

Just, thank you!

*I am using Delicious Brains SpinUpWP for one of my servers that doesn’t have access to phpMyAdmin so direct DB access is proving tough at the mo!