When you say you are “reformatting” them, what exactly does that mean?
Generally a Theme only effects the layout and style, not the actual content, so you can develop a new Theme using a ‘sandbox’ or development/staging site using exported and imported content just so you can get the ‘look’ right. Occasionally as PHP functions get deprecated and replaced with new functions, that needs to be updated in the Theme as well, but again it doesn’t change the content, only how that content is queried and results returned.
As long as you’re not changing the actual content, then when you apply the new Theme, the ‘old’ content will simply look like it should in the new Theme.
And since ALL content in WP has it’s own database (record) ID, you will be duplicating content if you export it from your staging site and import it to your old site, unless you do something like BACKUP the existing (old site) database and then empty the tables via phpMyAdmin, THEN import the content. If it goes south, empty the tables again and restore from your backup.
A tip: If you do that (backuping your database then empty the tables before importing) be SURE that when you do the backup, do several -one of your whole DB, and then several smaller ones of only a few sequential tables at a time…..the reason is that MANY site hosts have a hard-coded timeout value on SQL queries, and a LARGE database backup may NOT restore before it times out…..if that happens, then you can try restoring the individual smaller database backups.
Hi Trisha, thank you for the tip with backing up, good to know!
When I saw I’m “re-formatting”, what I mean is the layout is going to change with each post. So, the old version does not use page builder, it’s just content in the standard editing window. But with the new site, I’m using Page Builder, which is (if you are not familiar), a layout system with different boxes / modules to organize text and images on that page. It’s not like I am just changing colors and a theme and making a switch, it’s more complicated than that. It’ll take time to convert each post with the new layout, one at a time, and I want this to be done somewhere not live so that when we do go live, it’s all set for the public.
I may have to do as you suggested in the backup method. Just exhausting my resources to make sure there’s not a simpler way.
Thanks!
