Hi there, beginner here.
I’m working with a site that has high traffic and good seo, so I test any changes and updates locally before doing the same on the live site. My local version looks exactly like the live site
Now I have to update a theme and a plugin that goes with it. I did it locally and everything works like a charm. Is it still possible that the live site has problems if I do the same\`, because of the two different environments or whatnot?
I got too much stress before doing all that live, so I need to check. I’m not even pushing local changes to the live site, just repeating everything I do locally to the live site.
Yes, there’s many many changes that can be different across different environments.
Your best to have a staging site set up on your host that’s identical to live. Some hosts support this with some fancy feature, but in cPanel you can just add a new subdomain for staging (make sure to disable indexing at the bare minimum)
Then you can develop and test on local, then deploy to staging and test again, fix any issues and repeat, then deploy to production and test again.