Building a new website without affecting the current website (wordpress) until finished? Concerned about google web crawling, seo, ssl certificates, wordpress config, etc.
I was advised to create a new subdomain and build the new website there but I have concerns about this approach. After your build your new site (wordpress) on the newly created subdomain how do you redirect the main domain to that subdomain and not break google's web crawling or SSL certificates or anything else?
Building and testing separately from the current site is always the best approach. A separate development environment is always preferable, if possible. This also allows you to test upgrades and changes in future before making them on the live site and risking an error.
Whether you have a separate environment or not, there are 2 ways you can build the site separately from the current site:
1. Build in a separate location and then migrate the installation to the current hosting when its ready.
This is a common approach but it is quite tricky if you try to do it manually - a common question here is how to fix a broken site after a manual migration.
My recommendation is to use a plugin that is designed to do it all for you. You can have the site moved and running perfectly in minutes without all the hassle. I use the free Duplicator plugin, but there are others.
See how to migrate a Wordpress site in 4 quick & easy steps
2. Build in a subfolder of the current website and switch it to run from the root domain
An alternative option is to build it in a sub folder (a subdomain will not work for this approach). When you're ready, it just takes a few steps to make it run from the root domain without moving anything.
Note that this is then your live site, so you don't have this as a copy for testing upgrades in future.
See how to set up WP that's installed in a subfolder so that it runs from the root domain
Finally - whichever approach you take, if your new urls are different from the current site, you should set up 301 redirects so that both your users and Google can find the corresponding pages and it doesn't hurt your Google ranking.
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I have a live newspaper WordPress website with about 10 users updating it daily with about 2000+ unique visitors a day. I have a sum of about 30 posts a day added to my db and i host my own pictures.
My goal is to change my theme that has been used for over 4 years so smoothly that I don't experience much hiccup for my viewers.
I want a dev environment somewhere in my server that I can test my new theme with my current posts.
A solution I have in my head is to create a subdomain for example "dev.example.com" and deploy the new theme there and have two working wordpress themes with one database.
Is this even possible? I need to have my new theme that is in a dev environment have access to my live database.
What is the best practice for this situation?
for people looking into this like me, I will post my findings below and if you like you can comment to guide me or tell me what I'm doing wrong or right.
there is a wp-staging plugin that can be used but it seems to be paid if you want to push changes from staging version to production version of your website.
I have also figured out that another wp website can be installed on a subdomain that you can create through cpanel and install a brand new wordpress environment that is completely separate from your live site with its own db and config.
Since most of us don't have unlimited server resources its going to be pretty heavy to clone everything from live site to staging site and I figured they cant share a db because changes made to staging site can effect live site if they share a database.
So I looked over a very well summarized easy youtube video which basically explained the whole process for cloning your wordpress on your subdomain and using a new db, but this solution can be good if you have the server space and resources, for a website like mine i would guess that a local installation of wordpress would work.
One of the comments on that video was very usefull as well:
Just create a subdomain, install WordPress with Softaculous on the subdomain, install the All In One WP Migration Plugin on both the main site and the subdomain, export the file in All In One WP Migration on the main site and import it to the subdomain and vice versa, you have your staging.
I am re-designing a website that already exists on network solutions. I would like to keep the same domain for the new site but I am going to use wordpress through network solutions.
How would I install Wordpress without interrupting the current site?
Then once the new website is done, I would need to replace it with the existing site without interrupting the file structure to keep all images and links I've coded into the "staging" instance?
What people usually do in this case is create a subdomain where the development version of the site will live (eg. https://staging.example.com or https://dev.example.com) so both sites can coexist without affecting one another.
Another approach would be to create a folder in the main domain (eg. https://www.example.com/staging/ or https://www.example.com/dev/) and do all the work there. Personally I don't use this approach, I prefer the one mentioned above the best as it keeps both sites completely separated.
I am trying to set up a development site on the sub-domain development.warriorsliveon.org of warriorsliveon.org.
This is a WordPress site and I copied the plug-ins, themes, and upload folders to the new WordPress installation on the sub-domain. I also copied the database from warriorsliveon.org, did a find and replace of warriorsliveon.org to development.warriorsliveon.org.
When I go to the site , http://development.warriorsliveon.org. it either switches automatically to the follow address, or other times, lets me log into WordPress, but then goes to this address.
http://development.development.www.development.development.warriorsliveon.org/
Anyone have any ideas where I should look to resolve this issue?
I'm happy to post any code, just not sure at this point what would be useful. Any help is appreciated!
Changing the Domain Name that your Wordpress installation runs under is more complicated than just editing one or two files. The best approach is to use a tool like https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/
If you download this free tool and upload to your server then it does a batch find-and-replace across every single table in your Wordpress database.
So, for example, replace http://www.warriorsliveon.org with http://development.warriorsliveon.org
You can do a dry run and it will show you all the replaces that it will make. Once you're happy then click the "live run" button and all the changes are made.
I use this tool all the time when I am moving a site from my local machine to the live server. I also use the exact same approach when migrating a site from http to https
I am having a website redesigned. The designers plan to use Wordpress as the CMS and want a development copy to work with. Thing is, I now have Wordpress installed to run a blog (only) on a subdirectory of my current site.
Soooo...question is: Can I create a subdomain, install Wordpress on there, point it at a separate (new) schema on MySQL and have them use that for the development work? I know I can physically do this, but will anything about running the the WP install scripts on the subdomain screw up the existing production install on the main domain?
The install itself should not create any problems. Personally, I always develop WP sites in their own subdomain, allowing me to do away with the wordpress/ subdirectory.
The most significant hurdle will come when you are ready to move the development site to a new domain and/or place in the directory hierarchy. Although the theme files and their associated CSS, JS, etc., files should be using relative-path references, the database itself may contain hundreds of fully qualified URLs that reference the development domain and/or directory.
There are a number of WordPress plugins that address this problems. The one I am most familiar with is BackupBuddy from ithemes.com. (I'm not a shill, just a satisfied customer.) BB is useful both for performing scheduled backups (full or database-only), but it is also very useful during development and during deployment. There is an included script, importbuddy.php, than can not only take a .zip of a full backup and restore the site, it can also move the site from one directory and/or domain to another.
Note: BackupBuddy is not free, but it is released under GPLv2. You are paying for the support necessary to keep it tracking changes in the WP ecosystem. If you are doing any serious WP work then it is money well-spent. You might suggest this to your designers.
Yes you can do it. It doesn't matter. You can install your new blogs to any directory or subdomain (actually they're directories, too). Also you can use new MySQL databases for them, or you can use same database for your all WP installations (by editing wp-config.php manually), thereby you'll have same content for your all WP blogs.
Technically, yes you can do it.
However, if you have a live domain with public people using it, you are best not developing on either the same domain or server, because:
Mistakes happen. You can break the database or other code.
While you develop, you can affect performance of the server.
Develop on a local machine, or a completely different server, and when you are happy with it, push the code live onto the production server.
if you are planning to make a test copy of the current install on a subdomain which includes separate source code and database the answer is NO it will not affect your current installation.
we have a VPS for new site development, and were planning on using unique IP addresses for each new site/account so that while in development all links, URLs, etc. would be relative to the root (IP address) while in development and not need to change when going live (redirecting domain). But now our host won't allow us to purchase new IP addresses (according to worldwide shortage).
So now all new sites will be located at: http://shared.ip.add.ress/~cpanelaccount/. That means that while in development the sites are not using a root URL as we have been doing.
What is the best workflow while in development for relatively complex CMS solutions where we need to be able to confidently setup and test all links, SEF URLs, plugins, components, etc. without worrying about things getting messed up when the domain is switched (site goes live)?
Do we need to do some sort of global redirect in the .htaccess file?
Any modifications or strategies specific to Wordpress and/or Joomla installs?
THANKS!
I'd have to do an install of the latest WP to be sure, but at least with Joomla it is fairly irrelevant if you install in the root or a subdirectory. In the case of Joomla, there is only one change that needs to be made when moving from a subdirectory to the root. You'd need to change .htaccess to reflect the correct installation directory if you have enabled core SEF. Otherwise, there are no changes that need to be made at all. I am pretty sure WP is just as easy to move, but I'd have to look, it's been a while since I moved a WP site.