Best Practice For Website Redesign & Migration

[Mark_Ch]

Hi,

I'm looking to redesign my current live website to a new Wordpress site using "Studiopress Enterprise Theme".

I'm new to Wordpress and therefore will be embarking on lots of testing & development.
I do not want to hurt my current live website whilst testing the new Wordpress site. However, it would be nice to bring the test site into the current live environment without changing untold urls, etc.

Question
What is the best practice to setup this new Wordpress environment for my domain: www.sampledomain.co.uk

How would you restrict Google, Bing, etc from indexing, etc. whilst testing in the live environment.

What other consideration should I be aware of

Thanks

Mark

[Mike_Davis]

I would recommend that you work on your new website on a staging site (that is the standard operating procedure for a website redesign) that is locked against robots.  You can either inject into the header of everyone of your pages or you can (recommended) install a plugin that will make sure that your site is not indexed until you are ready.  A word of caution though, don't forget to change the tag to after you are done.  This Q/A is filled with people wondering why Google hadn't indexed them after they failed to do so.

[Mark_Ch]

Hi Mike,

Thank you for the response.
How would I go about creating a staging site?  I'm new to this...

Mark

[Mike_Davis]

I would install your new site on a subdomain and then push it to your live site once all of your redirects are in place. Here is a great article about moving your wordpress site from dev to staging to production.  <a>http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress </a>

I hope that helps!

[ParagonDigital]

Hi Mark,

I recommend creating a subdomain like dev.yourdomain.com or staging.yourdomain.com. Password protect the directory so no one ends up on the wrong site and there's no chance search engines will crawl it.

Copy all your files to the subdomains folder, most hosting control panels just create a folder in your main website for subdomains so you can do this in the file manager. Otherwise, download a copy and upload it to the subdomain's folder.

Export your database using PHPmyAdmin, create a new database and import the data into the new database. After you import the data find the wp_options table and edit homeurl and siteurl to be dev.yourdomain.com.

Edit wp-config.php on the dev site to use the new database, user and password.

You should be all set with your dev site at this point and you'll keep your current settings and content so you don't end up with a bunch URL changes.

When you're ready to move the changes to your live site back everything up and do the opposite of the steps above.

I also use the Search and Replace plugin to search the database for http://dev.yoursite.com and replace with http://www.yoursite.com after moving everything over so you don't have any links pointing back to the dev site.

[Mark_Ch]

Thank you Mike & Zach for the feature rich solutions.

With the above information, I will be creating a subdomain along the lines of staging.sampledomain.co.uk
I will further password protect this subdomain using Plesk.
I will tweak the setting of Wordpress to noindex, follow to stop search engines from trying to crawl.

I assume Wordpress would be installed in the subdomain staging directory along with all relevant themes and plugins.

Also, I assume for each and every instance of a new domain, a fresh install of Wordpress will be required?

Thanks Mark

[ParagonDigital]

Sounds like you got it, except I would recommend copying over your current site as a starting point vs. installing a fresh copy of WordPress. That way you are starting with the same content and settings and less likely to cause problems with URLs changing. It's also a lot less work if you have a larger site. Just copy of all the files and create a new database,  import the data from your current site and make the couple edits mentioned above and you'll be all set. Good Luck!

[Mark_Ch]

Hi Zach,

Your logic of copying same content and setting would only apply if my current website where previously created in Wordpress.

My current website was created in Dreamweaver and tweaked by hand. It currently has not interaction with a database or Wordpress.

In short, I believe my needs would be to create a new instance of Wordpress.

Thanks Mark

[ParagonDigital]

Ah, you are correct! Sorry I thought you were already on WordPress and just looking to change your theme.

[Mark_Ch]

Hi Zach,

Thank you for all your help today.

Regards Mark