As inhabitants of the 21st century, all of us have been acquainted with the immense benefits of the open-source content management system (CMS) called WordPress, specializing in creating and managing websites. The purpose is to make the process easier for human usage.
While there are several ways to shift from development to production, the right one to trust remains the same.
When the move is between domain names (i.e., newsin.newsite.com -> www.newsin.com), the most effective way is the manual way. Although one plugin is used for convenience, it is mainly manual.
One can follow the following steps to make the shift without much hazard:
- Backup- The first thing that one should do is to make a backup of everything before starting the conversion process. SSH is one way that one can use, to sum up the web directory and discard the database. One can even export from PhpMyAdmin or make a copy of the web directory via FTP.
- Check- There are certain things one should check before one starts: the creation of a user with Administrator, removal of unnecessary plugins, updating of everything, deleting any demo materials, replacing test email addresses, and other general things.
- Switch names- While one can switch manually with the Update statements on the database, a plugin can do the job for us. Go Live Update URLs. It takes the string and replaces it all with the other string without much difficulty.
- Modifying the file- Edit the computer's hosts file and then change the IP address that the domain name points to. This gives access to a preview of the new live site before it is actually available live. Once this is done, fix all problems to ensure that you are ready to start.
- Pack up This is a necessary process. It is the same as the first step. Just give appropriate files names as it is now a deliverable site and database.
- Transfer to new server- FTP works well in this. To complete the transfer, one has to host the assets somewhere accessible and do a get on the new server.
- Unpack- What you have to do is Unzip the files from the site and import the database script into the new environment created.
- Configure- Once the unpacking is done, open up the wp-config.php file. Then one needs to update the database connection settings so that it is available for use in the new server. One thing that needs to be taken care of is that the file and directory owner and group are correct.
- Cache- If everything gets done correctly, the website should be running. The last step includes enabling cache and installing security measures so as to ensure a bit of protection.
Conclusion
This is not a very tiring process. If the website is a small one it hardly takes 15 minutes to complete the process. There are other ways to do the same, which take much less time and energy. It would be best if you hired a WordPress development company for a more hassle-free process. However, they are not reliable as the plug-ins are often better to not give full access, and often, many things get missing. Thus, the best way is manual mode.
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