We have always built our client’s new websites on what we call our ‘staging platform’, this allows our clients (with the appropriate log in credentials) to view the site as the build progresses and comment on any areas that may need further alteration and amendment before the site is committed to a live environment.
Once the site has been completed, tested and signed off by our client then it is migrated to its ‘live environment’ and launched at its new URL, the site launch then being appropriately announced and marketed.
The way we have, from a back-end perspective, managed to migrate to the new live environment has changed over the years from a very slow manual process of moving the main files and databases (including making amendments to URL’s within the database) and thereafter correlating the two within the new live environment to utilising software to partly assist with the migration process.
We recently decided to test the WordPress plug in Duplicator by Snap Creek. What an absolute delight to both learn how to use and to actually use, making the entire migration process of a WordPress site (from one server to another with or without a change of the main domain URL) so simple, it worked like a dream and since our first test migration we have subsequently carried out many more migrations, for various reasons, without any problems whatsoever.
Duplicator boasts over 10 million downloads, 1+ million active installations along with a full 5-star rating from (at the time of writing) 1,972 reviews.
Duplicator enables you to:
- Move, migrate or clone a WordPress site between domains or hosts with zero downtime
- Pull down a live site to localhost for development
- Transfer a WordPress site from one host to another
- Manually back up a WordPress site or parts of a site
- Duplicate a live site to a staging area or vice versa
- Bundle up an entire WordPress site for easy reuse or distribution
- Perform a full WordPress migration without struggling with messy import/export SQL scripts
As well as using Duplicator to easily migrate your WordPress site, which the free version does a superb job of, it can also be used with the purchase of the Pro version to Schedule Backups with Cloud Storage to Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3 and FTP/SFTP along with a host of many other additional useful features.
If you are looking to migrate your WordPress site we almost certainly recommend that you seriously consider using Duplicator, take a read of the Quick Start Guide it really is very straightforward.
