I commonly work on a clients WooCommerce shop that has high daily traffic (order and visit wise) and has many active subscriptions. The website uses environments (staging, production etc.) for testing and validating changes and keeping the production environment clean. I usually use WP Migrate for doing DB migrations. I rarely work on WooCommerce websites but I have worked with WordPress sites in the past. My usual workflow handling changes that involves content:
1. Migrate Prod to Staging (Prod remains live)
2. Client makes necessary content changes or adds new content if required in the staging environment
3. Migrate everything back to Prod
This workflow is quite straightforward and changes are live instantly. However, when it comes to WooCommerce shops, you’re also dealing with constant DB mutations, so a simple migration workflow like the one I mentioned just wouldn’t work.
I recently overhauled several pages and refactored existing functionalities for the client. Usually I’ll just push it to prod and help the client prep the necessary pages if it involves new content (which you can do behind the screen and leave the old pages up). However currently, I had to introduce some breaking changes so I’ve planned the following:
1. Plan a moment and put the website in maintenance mode (admins can still use it, visitors cannot).
2. Push changes to Prod
3. Fix existing content, prep new content
4. Once done, pull the website off maintenance mode.
I know that using WP Migrate you can migrate specific tables, but this feels very risky and last thing I need is having to deal with a corrupted database on an active production webshop.
So my question is, what is the best practice here in terms of migrating content with high-traffic woocommerce webshops? And what are the possibilities of allowing a client to prepare content on the staging environment and then push those changes to production WITHOUT harming the db mutations of orders being placed and active subscriptions?
Thank you!
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