I’m an amateur site builder, I have a site I built on Divi years ago, it’s very busy. I want to start again from scratch using Brickbuilder, but don’t want to disturb my users.
It’s going to take me some time while I’m learning and experimenting, so I don’t want to do it on my live site. Can I build the site on another domain. (I have a few dormant domains on a server) and then when it’s looking good, import it into my live site?
Thanks
Yes you can build on another domain. Using “staging.YOURDOMAIN com” is best practice.
Have you tried Local? It’s free. You don’t have to connect to the hosting. You can build on your local just as you would on a server.
Follow the instructions in the Bricksbuilder Academy. Its worth the extra time to avoid lost time looking for how to do things.
I haven’t done this with a live website yet, but you definitely should be able to.
The more you use templates and components the better. That will mean less page content to move later.
You can copy/paste entire page content with the copy all and paste buttons. You can export and import templates. You can export and import theme styles. You can export and import global classes and global variables.
That should be all you need to know to get it done.
I would suggest duplicating your website to the other domain so when you import your bricks content back all of the images are the same. That should save you a little time.
You will need to activate Bricks in order to do the import, so expect your website to look like garbage while you’re actually doing the work. Give your visitors a heads up about maintenance and try to do it during the night when visitor count is low.
In an emergency (if you run into a problem and importing your bricks content becomes a multi day project), you should be able to activate your old theme while you aren’t working on it to keep the website usable in the meantime.
If you want to start from scratch completely (fresh database, fresh media, etc), you can start a fresh WordPress install, build it with Bricks, and then import any user content you need to keep (contact form posts, WooCommerce orders, etc) into your new bricks site. Then change the domain name to point to your new server instead of the Divi site.
Make sure to make backups of your old site!
Expect users to continue adding new UGC (orders, etc) right up until the second you direct the domain name to the new server. So even after doing that you might still need to spend time migrating content over from the old database.