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Hi all
This has been asked before but I haven’t found a solid answer or people that actually had the experience.
I need to redesign a website, part informative, part Woocommerce store. It was made using the Divi theme and Divi builder, however I need to use a different theme and most likely using native wordpress blocks. The live site needs to be working as long as possible and I can’t risk losing Woocommerce data.
So what’s the best practice?
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Setup a development server. Create a DNS subdomain entry like “[dev.example.com](https://dev.example.com)”. Do not do anything on the live/production server.
I develop on live sites because I like the rush. Depending on how big the site is I would first do a backup before doing any editing.
You won’t lose any WooCommerce data because it is stored in the database.
Open up every page in a new tab so that you can compare it to the one you are recreating. If your current site is using a page builder you may lose the text descriptions and titles even page style.
If you find yourself overwhelmed then just revert back to your backup.
What I would do is export products and orders from the live site to the staging site. You might need a plugin to do so.
Then you can push the staging site live.
I’d probably put live site in maintenance mode and take a backup immediately before exporting orders and products, that way you have a catch all of orders and don’t have any new orders sneak through. Then immediately upon the orders being imported to the staging site, you can immediately clone it over the top of the live site.
In fact, likely what I’d do is create a development site from a clone of my live site and then build from that. That way you have all the products, orders, posts, user accounts, media, and content and then you can just delete plugins and swap out themes as you build.
That way, when you go to export the products and orders later, you’re at least working from a similar inital database structure.