What are some best practices for switching the child theme for a production site?

Another option for site migration is a premium (Paid) plug-in called BackupBuddy from iThemes. You make a full site backup of your completed development site then place that backup file into an empty folder in your hosting account along with a file called importbuddy.php. Make an empty MySQL database and note the database name, username and password. When you are ready, go to http://www.yoursite.com/importbuddy.php and start the migration. It duplicates the site with whatever domain name you specify and changes the associated links in the database.

The only restriction is that it must be made in an empty folder and an empty database – it will not overwrite an existing WP install.

As a side benefit you can configure the plug-in to make backups on a schedule and save them not only to your own hosting account but also send them off-site to something like your Dropbox account.

http://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/

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