My company has an existing WordPress website in a domain www.example

Now, we realized that it is too cluttered, inefficient and has a poor SEO. Planning to redesign the website, but the domain has been marketed so widely that we can not afford the downtime of long durations. Our idea now is to leave the existing website do it's job, create a subfolder example/newsite -> install a new instance of WP there, design it clean and good -> then move all the files via cPanel to the root folder and take down the existing wordpress files.

Is this practically possible? Or how do you recommend doing this task efficiently?

Also kindly advice what are all the security precautions we need to take care for our WP website to be safe from hackers during and after the migration.

TIA for the community.

My company has an existing WordPress website in a domain www.example

Now, we realized that it is too cluttered, inefficient and has a poor SEO. Planning to redesign the website, but the domain has been marketed so widely that we can not afford the downtime of long durations. Our idea now is to leave the existing website do it's job, create a subfolder example/newsite -> install a new instance of WP there, design it clean and good -> then move all the files via cPanel to the root folder and take down the existing wordpress files.

Is this practically possible? Or how do you recommend doing this task efficiently?

Also kindly advice what are all the security precautions we need to take care for our WP website to be safe from hackers during and after the migration.

TIA for the community.

• subdomains

Share Improve this question asked Aug 9, 2019 at 5:57 JohnehJohneh 122 bronze badges

Add a comment  | 

1 Answer 1

Sorted by: Reset to default 1

Yes, it is possible - even more - this is common practice. But...

1. When creating new site, you should never do it directly on production server - during development the site is not as secure as it should be.

2. During development the site should never be public - you'll have a lot more work if search engines will index such temporary site.

3. You should take care of all URLs from old site (people very often forget about this step).

So I would recommend to:

1. Create new site offline, migrate all contents, take care of all URLs from old site.

2. When the site is ready, upload it to the production server (place it in subfolder, because uploading may take few minutes). Move old site to subfolder and move new site from subfolder to root folder (these 2 operations should be very quick).

3. Secure the new site.

4. If everything works OK, dump old site and remove it from server (never leave old site on server - it would be a huge security flaw).

5. Monitor any 404 errors and fix them.