Developing WP parallelly to old site - then going live

6 replies
Hello!

What would be the easiest or most secure approach?

There is an old website that does NOT run on Wordpress.

Now there has to be developed a nwe site powered by WP.

I am planning to finish the new version of the site on a "dev." subdomain and then to move it to the new (root) domain.

I found this page:

Moving WordPress « WordPress Codex

And i found these plugins:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/
WordPress › WP Clone by WP Academy « WordPress Plugins

Which way would you go?

Would be very grateful for hints & suggestions!

- Paradoxi
#developing #live #parallelly #site
  • Profile picture of the author RobinInTexas
    I would build the home page in WordPress and go live with that, the old pages could remain until they are moved to WordPress or until you choose to delete them. The only likely conflict might be an index.php
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  • Profile picture of the author kewkii
    It looks like you are using the same approach as we would in these situtaions ... Develop new WP site on development server. Then once the client is happy with the new site transfer it onto the live server using the Duplicator plugin. The only thing I'd add is look at existing site structure and try and maintain the same page names etc. so that any incoming links aren't broken. Or if the site is completely different set up redirects from the old pages to the new, better to show users something other than a 404?
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  • Profile picture of the author Anne Laidlaw
    I create a custom 404 page with a sorry blurb and links to the homepage.
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    • Profile picture of the author kewkii
      Originally Posted by Anne Laidlaw View Post

      I create a custom 404 page with a sorry blurb and links to the homepage.
      I guess it depends on the site ... if the old site pages are out of date (in that the information is no longer relevant) then a custom 404 explaining that fact might be the way forward rather than 'just redirecting'. However on a monetised site you may not want to pass up on someones click through and redirect them straight to a similar page.

      Just my thoughts
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  • Profile picture of the author Paradoxi
    Thank you all for your helpful insights!

    I will develop the site on a local installation of wordpress via WampServer, the web development platform on Windows - Apache, MySQL, PHP
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  • Profile picture of the author Preben Frenning
    There's no point in developing locally if you have good internet IMHO. It can be slow and annoying to get set up.

    If I where you, I'd just install WP on a subdomain and move it when it is finished. WP Clone makes this really easy! But watch out for potential DB timeouts. If that happens, try choosing advanced, then add "uploads", and perhaps "plugins" to the excluded folders.

    Also, since duplicating your site with WP Clone is so easy, make sure you have a live backup of your site somewhere. - If anything happens to your main site, just redirect your index.php to the other site. This is also helpful for further development.
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