Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for doing a Migration from a Dev site

Beaver Builder
1

Over the past couple of days I struggled to make a site live from a Dev site. I stayed up late when my client’s site traffic would be low and then did a typical migration process using “find/replace” to the mysql database, only to find that pages that were created within BeaverBuilder did not show.

I tried it two nights in a row and figured I was doing something wrong because of human error or my part. After all, I stayed up very late, was tired, and figured I made a mistake in my migration process. But alas, after searching this support forum, I see the issue was caused due to “serialized data” being used with BeaverBuilder.

I’m not a developer myself, and I do not really know (or care!) what exactly “serialized data” means, but I do know that I needed to adjust my procedure for doing site migrations. So born from this process, I decided to write down the steps that I used when making a Dev site live. I hope that these procedures might help others who are in the same situation as me and help save you time.

The only caveat is that this procedure is using BackupBuddy, which is a paid plugin from iThemes: https://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/

I did see other support suggestions in other threads by Ben and team who linked to free plug-ins that can do the same. Since I already had a paid subscription to BackupBuddy, I wrote this SOP using it.

Here is a public link to my procedure called “Making a Staged Site Live to a Production Server (using BackupBuddy)”
https://www.evernote.com/l/AAiegv3e14FK85Dzv39ezRLFuOn0nUUZlVQ

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Hey Dustin,

Thank you for this very descriptive guide! We really appreciate it! In fact, I’m going to start sharing this right now(on another thread). :slight_smile:

Ben

3

Awesome!

4

Hey Dustin,

Just wondering though, did you really need to do the last step(Step 10)? I actually thought BackupBuddy does that?

Ben

5

Yes, I did have to do some manual Find/Replace on my side. I have a custom plug-in built for my sites and the URLs are stored as absolute URLs (not relative).

So probably others would not need to do this step. I will update the SOP to reflect this specific situation.

6

Thanks Dustin, that’s super cool of you to post this! I’m sure this will help a ton and we’ll definitely be referring users to it if they have issues!

Best,
Billy

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When I first started using the BB products, my very first migration with BackupBuddy (from local WAMP to live site) failed, but since then there have been a number of updates to BackupBuddy and I have never had an issue since.
I migrate 5 or 6 sites a week using BackupBuddy and my experience is 100% success with no extra steps to include…
Just letting you know my experience…
Cheers, Dave

8

I use BUB as well for migrations and it works typically for smaller and medium sized sites (depending on the server). Step 10 is needed as Dustin mention with some plugins that BUB does not update the link for. BUB has a search and replace function in their importbuddy.php script, but I have not tested it yet.

Nice SOP Dustin and hopeful useful for others out there.

9

You guys, I think it will not be the same way …
I have a site to build a temporary field, and after approval peo customer I will need to migrate the site to the client domain …

And I will not have escape: I will have to sign the plugin: BackupBuddy it will be much easier to migrate than banging my head trying to …

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Hey Rafael,

The guide does use BackupBuddy, along with a few other steps to ensure the migration is successful.

Ben