Although there’s little chance that something went wrong, first of all make sure that you content is actually there. Just edit a post from your dashboard and make sure it looks like it should, Now, it looks like you have different themes on you live and staging sites, so it most probably is an issue … Read more
You can start by doing a full filesystem and database and put the same thing running on your staging environment under a different domain. Don’t do configuration under this installation or if you do bare in mind that changes will be lost since you want to periodically sync the production database with the staging one … Read more
Congrats on your first client. I’m glad you are looking around to make sure that you start off on the right foot. Like anything that you start in life, your experience will increase over time and the more you practice. However, we live in a digital age and popular open-source platforms such as WordPress have … Read more
I make sure the structure (page-title, categories, custom-post types) have the optimal headings and correct structure before migrating. Small changes such as a logo or minor graphics shouldn’t effect the quality of the website once moved to production.
Native WordPress import/export file is focused very tightly on content. It is not meant and cannot (or at least no one bothers to try bend it that way) accurately represent the state of whole site. The missing storage you are looking for is likely Options API, which is heavily used by core and third party … Read more
You can use dev.example.com, so that you dont have to move contents all the time. you can make it password and ip protected if you want
how to move particular functionality to staging server
Well, I will try to answer my question myself. From what I’ve learnt there is no easy and gentle ways to exclude plugins on the fly. Each plugin,if you lucky, has uninstall.php witch executed upon when you click button “delete”. So if you harshly remove plugin it will leave traces in databases. Even if you … Read more
I’ll offer a couple alternatives to @jgraup but his suggestions are all good ones. I also must note that I use macOS so some of the particulars of these suggestions won’t work on a PC but there should be equivalents. If my client(s) already have a site up using maindomain.com, I will usually set up … Read more
Copy the keys and salts from the production site? Try updating the password with WP-CLI?