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This is a more general question about WP website best practices.

An issue I encounter with many of my clients is maintaining two identical WP installs (staging and production). They insist on seeing changes before they go live. However, with WP's structure, that would involve constantly clearing and re-importing databases in addition to updating theme files.

Is there a simple answer out there that would allow me to maintain two identical WP websites with as few headaches as possible?

Thank you in advance for your help! Jake

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  • I just shuffle my database & template files back and forth between two servers. I'd love to hear a good answer to this too.
    – Dalton Rooney
    Mar 8, 2011 at 18:46

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You might be interested in this Q/A in the FAQ category:

How to: Easily Move a WordPress Install from Development to Production?

Server mirroring/migration is a pain because there are so many pieces that might (or might not) need to be synced. PHP code (core, plugins, themes) is easy enough to keep straight. But when it comes to data, it gets messier. You've got your content, user accounts, and lots of option settings. Some of which will come from your plugins and themes, and which are typically not namespaced in any way that lets us manage them well. Plus, some of the options are 'hardcoded' to your hostname/URL, and internal links (such as for media) are hardcoded based on the configured URL, as well.

I keep hoping that over time, we'll come up with some changes to core that will help mitigate at least some of these issues.

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  • Thanks, there's a good bit of information in that other post!
    – Dalton Rooney
    Mar 10, 2011 at 19:09
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I found this article on WPtuts informative:

How to Sync A Local & Remote WordPress Blog Using Version Control

http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-sync-a-local-remote-wordpress-blog-using-version-control/

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Hello this was something I needed to do as well, only I wanted it automated.

I wanted a mirror of domain www.example1.com to www.example2.com.

This mirror needed to be fully functional, so that means all the URL's need to be changed from example1.com to example2.com in the database.

This needs to be done so that all the links and internal URLs point to example2.com on the mirrored domain.

All uploaded data needed to be synchronized from www.example1.com to www.example2.com

What I did was create three scripts to do just that for me and I never need to worry about it, it's self maintained!

This software is free open source and available on Github.

Here is a post on the process used to Automating the Mirroring of WordPress to Another Domain

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  • Answers should be more than plain links. They should actually be an answer instead of a route where someone will maybe find an answer. Please help preventing link rot, edit your answer and provide the needed information that helps the OP as well as later visitors to solve their problem. Btw, all links here are nofollow.
    – kaiser
    Jan 23, 2015 at 7:18
  • Link is broken, from my point of view mirroring doesn't solve data updates while developing issues.
    – jnhghy - Alexandru Jantea
    Nov 14, 2016 at 16:25

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