Easy to develop on a URL that is changed for production?

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WordPress doesn’t work that way. If your developers are experienced enough to write the code dynamically, you won’t need to change the template Uri.

Let’s say you want to get a URL for a stylesheet, you can use:

echo get_template_directory_uri(). '/style.css';

This will automatically fetch the domain and the template’s Uri. This piece of code is dynamic, it means that it will produce the correct result under any domain.

After relocating a WordPress installation to another domain, you have to do two steps.

  1. Change the siturl and homeurl entries in the database. These are located under wp_options table, and must match your domain and WordPress installation directory.
  2. Do a search replace inside your posts, to replace the old harcoded permalinks ( for example, the images in your posts ) with the new URL. All you have to is to install a plugin such as better search replace and replace every old-domain.com with new-domain.com.

That’s all it usually takes to transfer an installation.