Testing a premium theme on a sandbox account
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I want to purchase a premium theme but I can’t simply buy it and go live: I need to make many design and content changes in order to accommodate the new theme. Also, it is hard to be sure that the theme will work for me, even with the ‘Try and customize’ preview, until I get my hands dirty and modify some content in order to fit the theme.
Is it possible to get a sandbox environment to validate that the premium theme fits my needs and get everything prepared before I deploy the theme and updated content in the production environment? I currently use a different account (with a non-public site) as a sandbox and it would be silly to pay for the premium theme on both accounts.
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
First, I would suggest that you create a private test site for yourself in the same account as your actual site.
If both sites are in the same account you can purchase the theme for your test site, do the testing you need to do there, and when you’re ready we can help you move the theme to your actual site. But it gets complicated if we need to move a theme between two different accounts.
However, it’s not possible to have a staging site on WordPress.com that you can then just push to production with the click of a button. Any customizations you do on your test site you’ll need to do again on your actual site once you are ready to make the switch.
Also keep in mind that Premium themes have a 30 day refund period, so you could buy it for your test site to learn everything you need to, then cancel and refund it before buying it for your actual site.
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Thanks! This is very helpful. My test site is already on the same account as the production site so the transition should be easy.
One more question: can I export the content of the production site to the test site, and vice versa, using WordPress import/export functions? If so, do I have to wipe out the target site beforehand? If you have a process description to point me to, that would be great. I am trying to reduce manual work and duplicate entries as much as possible.
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You can transfer content between the sites in that way, yes.
Importing shouldn’t cause duplicate content as the importer is pretty good at spotting existing content – it won’t even import a post if it sees the same post in the target site’s trash – but if the content has been edited this means the changed content might not be imported.
It’s possible to empty a site yourself before importing, but if you have a lot of content we can also do it for you. It’s just important to note that if we empty the site it will permanently remove all posts, pages, comments and media files with no restore option, so make very sure you have the content safe in another site before requesting us to do that.
You can find instructions to manually empty a site here (remember to also empty the trash when deleting post/pages or the import won’t work):
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