Moving your test wordpress site to your website

  • hazzardzone

    (@hazzardzone)


    5 years, 1 month ago

    I wish to change some things on my existing self-hosted website. Possibly including its theme.

    My hope is to download wordpress and the existing site to my desktop machine, make the changes, then replace the current publicly available site on my host.

    Found a support page titled “Test Driving WordPress” which has an “Install WordPress on Your Computer” section that purports to help with exactly that. But alas, it helps only to get everything downloaded to a local machine. Even though part of the instructional text reads:

    We also cover Moving WordPress Onto Your Website after you have finished developing your site on your computer.

    When I click the link therein it takes me to the end of the page where I am informed:

    Coming soon – how to move your test site from your computer back live onto your host server site.

    Good thing I read that part before wasting my time with all the changes to my site. Which would have been futile without the promised how-to. Now, there’s no date on the page, but I was led to it through a link on a third party web page dated April 23rd, 2016.

    My question is: Where and when were those promised instructions published to the support forums?

    • This topic was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by hazzardzone.
    • This topic was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by Andrew Nevins. Reason: Decapitalized title
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  • RossMitchell

    (@rossmitchell)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    What I do in this situation is to configure the localhost webserver to use the “VirtualHost” method, details here:
    http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/vhosts/name-based.html

    Then I can switch between accessing the localhost and webhosted sites by adding and commenting out an entry in your “hosts” file, details here:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_(file)

    This way the website barely knows that it has changed hosting.

    Thread Starter hazzardzone

    (@hazzardzone)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    Thanks for your response. I appreciate the tip, though I had some difficulty following it.

    My question remains unanswered. Perhaps I should revise it to include two more specific parts:

      1. How is an existing website downloaded to my desktop for re-tooling with full WP functionality?

      2. How then is the existing live site replaced with the re-tooled site from my desktop?

    I’m not interested in creating a sandbox, or a WP test area at this time.

    Thanks in advance for any help on this.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by hazzardzone.
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