Development Site
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We are working on a current WP.com site: ExampleOnlyA.com
It is a WP site – since they are not allowed to host it anywhere else.
We need to change the look and feel of this but we don’t want to work on it on the live site. What is the best way to go about that?They were thinking about setting up a development site at: ExampleOnlyB.com and then redirecting the subdomain there when we are done. They had the following questions.
1. But can we import the content from the current site over?
2. Would there be a bunch of broken links? They want to be assured that existing links to the individual posts that are out in the world would not break.
3. Then they were asking if I could just make the changes on the development site and bring those edits to the current site rather than point the subdomain to the dev site.
4. They are thinking about upgrading to the Business Plan – if they do that – do they have to do that with both sites?I have always worked with WP.org sites, so I have had complete control over it. But this is something new. We really need to build a site on the development side, just not sure how to go about it on this platform.
Thank you!
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Hey there!
1. But can we import the content from the current site over?
You can, using our import and export tools. You can read about each of those here:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/export/
https://en.support.wordpress.com/import/2. Would there be a bunch of broken links? They want to be assured that existing links to the individual posts that are out in the world would not break.
No, our import tool translates the links over to the new site, and if you export content from it and back into the live site, it will translate those links as well (same with any media on the page).
It is worth noting that the import and export tools only move content (posts, pages, comments, media, etc.) and not any customizations (e.g., css or widgets) or theme/site settings.
3. Then they were asking if I could just make the changes on the development site and bring those edits to the current site rather than point the subdomain to the dev site.
There’s not any way to copy over theme settings and customizations, so it would be better to create the new site, and then, when you’re ready, we can move the domain on your account to another site. So if you had ExampleOnlyA.com pointed to yourgroovysite.wordpress.com, and then you had ExampleOnlyB.com pointed to groovydevelopmentsite.wordpress.com, once you’re done building the site at groovydevelopmentsite.wordpress.com, you can let one of us Happiness Engineer know and we can move ExampleOnlyA.com to groovydevelopmentsite.wordpress.com instead.
4. They are thinking about upgrading to the Business Plan – if they do that – do they have to do that with both sites?
That’s correct, subscription plans only apply to one site at a time. However, we can move subscription plans from one site to another like we can with a domain in the example above. So if you built the development site on a free plan, we could move the Business plan over later. You wouldn’t have access to unlimited premium themes on a free site, however, so if you’re planning on developing a site that uses a premium theme, that might be tricky.
Let me know if I can help with anything else!
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