WordPress design Vancouver
In this article, you’ll find out how to perform a WordPress design in Vancouver with a development environment.
When redesigning a WordPress site, it helps to be able to work on a copy of the site with a similar development environment, without taking the site offline for maintenance during this time. To do this, you need to prepare a pre-production environment where the site will be duplicated for a redesign.
There are many ways to work with WordPress. In the context of a site created with a CMS, we will favour a development environment on the server-side which will offer the advantage of working on the same environment as the site in production.
Creation of the pre-production environment – WordPress design Vancouver
Site creation
While developing a unique WordPress design in Vancouver the first step is to create the site on which the current version of your website will be copied. It is, therefore, necessary to create a new site (for example preprod.votre-site.com ) with your own directory on your Web hosting. To do this in Infomaniak, simply follow this guide, making sure to create a new directory (for example / preprod ) that is not in the folder of your site in production.
Creation of the database
After creating the site that will host the copy of your current site, it is necessary to prepare the database in which all its content (pages, articles, comments, etc.) will be duplicated. If necessary, this guide shows you step by step how to create a new database and a new user for your development environment.
Copy files and databases
Once the site and the database of the pre-production environment have been created, all that remains is to duplicate the files and content of your site.
To copy the files, we recommend using our FTP Manager or doing it in SSH to speed up the procedure. It is possible to export and import the database through our Manager or do it again in SSH if the database is large .
Editing the WordPress configuration file
The last step is to modify the following data from the pre-production site’s wp-config.php file :
- the name of the database (DB_NAME)
- the database user (DB_USER)
- the database user password (DB_PASSWORD)
If the production site is https, you will also need to activate an SSL certificate on the preproduction site
Finally, we recommend that you put your pre-production site into maintenance in order to avoid indexing by search engines. To this end, he can activate the maintenance mode of Infomaniak.
- Redesign of the site in a pre-production environment
Now that his development environment is ready, he can freely work on the redesign of his WordPress site: install one of our 80 free themes (Elegant Themes), test extensions, thoroughly review the structure of the site, etc.
If the structure of your site changes and the URLs of your articles / pages change, you can use a free extension such as Redirect to automatically create redirects. This will prevent visitors from stumbling upon 404 pages as the engines redirect your site or if external sites link to it.
- Publication of the new site
When he has finished redesigning his site, he just needs to change the target directory of the production site to the directory of the production environment and change the URLs of the pre-production site according to the domain name of the production site thanks to a extension such as Velvet Blues Update URL or via phpMyAdmin.
If you are using a cache extension such as WP-Rocket, W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache, you will need to completely clear the entire cache or even disable and reactivate the plugin.
After the usual checks (missing images? Wrong links? Etc.), it is sufficient to disable the maintenance mode of your site and admire the result 🙂
In summary, here are the steps to follow to publish your site:
- change the target directory of the votre-site.com site with / preprod
- use the Velvet Blues Update URL plugin to replace URLs in articles and pages of type preprod.votre-site.com with votre-site.com
- clear or even disable and then re-enable your cache plugin
- verify the correct functioning of its site
- disable maintenance
- Recovery of the latest changes
If you have continued to modify your site in production during its redesign, you will need to recover the changes (articles, multimedia files, pages, etc.).
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Infomaniak’s hosting and Cloud Servers are optimized for WordPress and offer many advantages for this CMS:
- 80 free themes (ElegantThemes, editor of the famous Divi theme )
- Automatic installation of WordPress and the chosen theme
- free SSL certificates
- Unlimited MySQL databases
SITE ASSISTANCE SERVICE WORDPRESS POST PUBLICATION
How does the WordPress support and assistance service work? What does the maintenance of the website built in WordPress consist of?
Once created and published, the website in WordPress requires constant updating, assistance and maintenance to be always efficient.
The first “assistance” intervention is the timely update of the core (ie the basic WordPress engine) every time a security update is released, in order to avoid hacker attacks that could compromise the stability of the site, its display and its positioning on search engines.
In addition to the core, the installed themes and plugins must also be updated for the same reasons.
Updates are not always possible. Especially in the presence of strong customizations, it may happen that the update of the theme, rather than the plugin is not compatible with the new version of WordPress.
For this reason it is important to make a complete backup before proceeding with the updates, as well as the tests and compatibility checks on a dedicated test environment that is not published and independent from the actual production environment.
