I would use the local site for testing new plugins and themes, and do all the writing on the live site. If you don’t like that, write it on the local site to get it just right, and then open the editor in HTML mode and paste it in there. You still have to do tags or categories and images. Yes, your sites get out of sync, but the local site is not the source of truth, because of the different URLs. The backup of the live site should be the source of truth.
@joyously
Thank you for your suggestion. I get that you say there’s no smart way to do this and I’d have to do the dirty work. I ask this because I am imagining all sorts of apps push updates and change some parts of their app, not all. This comparison may very well be out of touch with the reality of what a WP site is and how it works, and due to my idealistic imaginations 😀
If this is not possible, I’d prefer to actually update my live version once a week or every other week and by doing this I could allow the changes to become published together.
Also, do you know if this kind of approach could have an negative on website’s SEO?
The reasons you gave “(downtime, accidentally breaking sth, etc.)” don’t make much sense to me. If your site is down, you can’t update anything, much less write new content. You shouldn’t be breaking anything by writing content.
My suggestion is to use your local site as a test bed for plugin updates and WP updates, as well as trying new plugins or themes. Only when you test that those work fine do you do the corresponding update on the live site. A piecemeal approach is best for testing, by changing only one thing at a time so that you know what to do to fix it. You are unlikely to be able to get the local environment to exactly match the live site anyway.
WordPress has a long history, with millions of sites doing just fine with no staging or test sites at all. It’s not big of a deal to just have a live site, unless you have a really important site… A store or forum or something with a lot of user data (sales, invoices, comments, forum topics) cannot be handled with copying staging to live en masse. Most plugins that copy a site will do the entire database, not the delta, so you would lose all the user data.
I don’t know what you mean by “I am imagining all sorts of apps push updates and change some parts of their app, not all.”
There are no apps with WordPress. With a WP web site, there are files and database. The files contain the software(including plugins and themes) and any media you upload. The database contains the content you write, the taxonomies, the comments, the users, the options. When you update a plugin or theme, the entire folder is deleted and the new one unzipped.
SEO is unrelated to this topic, although Google has sort of indicated that new pages are better than old pages.
Thank you for your message. It answered my questions.
