How do you update your community website once officially live?
I've been working on setting up and designing my community site for over a month now. While I feel like I still have a lot of work to do on the website design and copy, I just want to launch it ASAP, too.
I'm thinking of launching it first, and then making further non-critical changes/additions later.
So, once it's live, how can I do the changes in the backend without messing up anything on the live site? Any guidance or resources (YouTube/Blog Articles) will be much appreciated! <3
- Use a staging site https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/space/community-meta/post/staging-with-the-single-site-l
- Take a full backup (files + database) before making any changes. So that you can restore the site if something goes wrong.
If you use a staging site, you will need to find a way to keep the FluentCommunity tables in the database, and any uploads, from the live site. Otherwise copying over the staging site will wipe anything that has happened in the community in the meantime.
One of the reasons I use a subdomain for the community part of the site.
Jonathan Gwyer Oh, wow! This was such a helpful warning! 😯 Thanks so much for sharing this, Jonathan!
Also, with that last sentence, you mean to say using a subdomain resolves this issue/threat altogether!??!
The GS If you put the community on a subdomain - a second WordPress install - then you can do whatever you like with the public-facing (or marketing) site.
The community site will tend to have fewer plugin changes, unlikely to change theme, all the things you might want to do on your marketing site that would need staging.
The kind of things you would be changing on the community site - testing plugin updates etc - tend to be quicker and therefore easier to test on a staging site then recreate on the live site.
Either way, backup, backup, backup 😁
Jonathan Gwyer This is so very helpful to learn! I can't thank you enough for this explanation, Jonathan! 😊🙌
Now, I'm going to brainstorm further on this subdomain route from an SEO perspective. Essentially, I want to aim at optimizing my "community content + blog content" together for search engines. So, I'm gonna check the subdomain's SEO potential.
Once again, I appreciate all your help! 💚