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Launching a Site that’s Setup as a Dev Subdomain

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  1. Get the sitemap of the current (soon to be old) site (You will need the urlist.txt for redirects).
  2. Back everything up (Current live site and database/ Dev site and database).
  3. Archive the old site on the local server.
  4. Log into dev site and deactivate All In One WP Security. 
  5. In FTP, create a new directory called “old” on the remote side in the root directory.
  6. Check for existing index.html file, if it exists then move to the old directory. Now upload the “Down for Maintenance” index.html file. 
  7. Go to the wp-options table for the dev site and change the home and siteurl fields from dev to the live domain.
  8. Move old site files into the “old” directory in FTP.
  9. Move dev site files to the root directory (usually public_html).
  10. Log into the new site (formerly the dev site) and save the permalinks (Settings > Permalinks).
  11. Go to Settings > Reading and uncheck the last box (Discourage search engines from indexing this site).
  12. Upload Search and Replace to the root directory in FTP. 
  13. Replace the dev url with the live sites url (i.e. http://dev.exampledomain.com/ replaced with http://exampledomain.com/).
  14. Click Dry Run. This will create a “mock” replacement so you can see if you have correctly changed the url. Click View Changes to see an example replacement.
  15. If everything looks good then click Live Run.
  16. Remove the index.html (Down For Maintenance) file from FTP.
  17. Remove the SR310 (Search and Replace) from FTP’s remote side.
  18. Log in to the new site.
  19. Turn All In One WP Security back on (activate). At the top of the plugin page WP Security will ask if you want the rules inserted back into the .htaccess file, click Yes.
  20. Examine the Style sheet, header, footer and other theme files for any dev urls that were not changed by the Search and Replace. This will also include plugins such as TablePress and Gravity Forms. The widgets section sometimes needs to be checked as well.
  21. Click through the site to make sure everything looks good and is working properly.
  22. Disable the Coming Soon page and then deactivate the plugin.
  23. Add SSL Cert, Google Analytics, Redirects and submit the sitemap to Google’s Search Console.
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