New WP Site - Staging vs. Child Theme?

Discussion in 'WordPress' started by KENH999, Jan 27, 2021.

  1. #1
    In very early stages of building a WP site for my wife's new training business. InMotion hosting with WP installed and a simple landing or 'coming soon' page is up. We have chosen a theme. While it was several years ago, I have some WP experience but not enough to consider myself skillful enough to do it all myself, plus it would take me forever. Now working on scope of work to hire a freelancer for basic theme setup.

    For obvious reasons want to keep the landing page up while we work on the theme setup, customization, plugins, etc. We also will be using a class registration SaaS (Active Network) so there's a good bit of setup to do.

    Question: For a new site like this, is it best to use a parent/child theme approach vs. staging? Is either approach better for initial work then easily go live? Keeping in mind that even after initial publishing we'll be tweaking the site (probably alot) as the business grows, do more SEO, etc. so would want a, for lack of better term, 'synced versions' so we can make changes, test and easily go live with the changes.

    What's the best choice? Child theme or stage? InMotion has the Softaculous Staging Tool.

    Thanks! Ken
     
    KENH999, Jan 27, 2021 IP
  2. Port443

    Port443 Peon

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    #2
    If you intend to scale and make changes to the theme at a later stage, I'd opt for the staging approach.
    With that setup, you can leave your "coming soon" page on the main site while working on the site on the staging site using the child theme.
    Once the site is built, you can then clone the staging over to live while keeping the staging site for tests and updates which can then be synced to the live site as and when needed.
     
    Port443, Jan 27, 2021 IP