Test site changes to Live site

[JeremiahParticipant]

My site isn’t live so just wanting to ask now before I mess something up after content is starting to be built.

My site is a classifieds website with a full CMS backend, ads, pages from users, ad space, etc… I migrated the site to my test site (search and replace) to test any changes as well as test any updates on theme and wordpress before the live version hits. (manually coded updates off for live site)

My question is When I want to make a change from the test site to the live site how do I do this so I do not lose customer registration, ads, etc.. from the live site? Do I just leave the database out of the backup? Just confused on how this would work I guess.

Thanks for any help!
Jeremiah

[udadminKeymaster]

Hi Jeremiah,

UpdraftPlus is intended for backing up, restoring and cloning a complete website, so is not normally the right tool for the job if you’re looking to merge two separate sites into one. UpdraftPlus can restore only the theme files (i.e. contents of wp-content/themes), and nothing else (because of its separating up the backup into themes/plugins/uploads), so any changes made to theme files can easily be separated. But if you have any other changes in the database, then you’ll need to supplement with other tools. e.g. If you have made changes to your theme settings, then they’d have gone into the database; you’d then look at what options your theme has for options export/import (or just note down which options need changing). If you have posts/pages that have changed, then look at the Tools -> Import/Export menu that’s in WordPress. It really depends on what you’re doing. Sadly WordPress doesn’t make this easy – lots of things internally aren’t cleanly separated (which is part of why we focus UpdraftPlus as a backup/restore/clone tool, rather than an all-purpose tool for integrating multiple sites).

David

[Author]

Posts