Operating a Site, Best Practices

  • I’m pretty new to WordPress and are still in the experimental phase of playing with themes, selecting and configuring plugins. I now have an idea of what my site should look like and what configuration to use. Next step is to come up with a process and structure how to manage my site configuration and what else needs to be done to keep my site working and resilient to problems. Unfortunately, Google hasn’t come up with many answers to my questions:

    How do I best separate design, test and life sites? I want to have at least two: design/test and life. How do I transfer configuration changes from one site to the other. How can I generate test content, can I copy life content to the test site. How will it work if I split design and test as well?

    How well are configuration and content separated? Is it possible to just copy the wordpress directory, change the database name and have a working second site?

    How to manage site backups seems to be covered in the documentation?

    What other pitfalls are out there from a purely operational point of view, user and content management being a whole different animal?

    Do I have to think about site growth and performance already or can I ignore this until I get X number of hits, Y number of users. How big are X and Y?

    Is there any information out there for this kind of questions? Websistes? Literature?

    Thanks for your help.

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  • If you are talking about configuration changes to the theme many of the better themes (I use Atahualpa) allow you to export and import the configuration. I am not sure about the configuration for word press itself though.

    For the setting up of a testing site, see the link below. Specifically, the part on using your real domain name and modifying your OS configuration instead.

    If you choose to use a different domain name for your test site, you’ll have to do a search and replace in the database file each time you want to switch from test to live, and vice versa.

    https://devpress.com/blog/a-really-sweet-wordpress-development-environment/

    Configuration and most content are all stored in the database. Themes, plugins and uploaded files go into wp-content. You’ll have to transfer this folder too when switching sites.

    Everything else is the core WordPress software and should not be edited.

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