Used Pressable’s Clone Site tool to create a pseudo Staging to Live Setup?
I did a few weeks back and just noticed there were still some lingering problems with legacy image url/permalinks after the fact.
While working on this site, I used the Clone site tool in Pressable to clone this site. 🙂
That created a new install on Pressable. I then did some work to migrate my theme from a StudioPress theme to Elegant Theme’s Divi, which I have had a lot of happy success with on my site and client sites.
After I had the theme initially setup and configured, I disconnected my domains on the first Pressable installation and reconnected (set them up) on the new Pressable installation.
That new installation was called Softduit-staging or something similar….
Then I ran the old trusted Velvet Blues plugin to go through my site and clean up the hyperlink/urls that had were pointing to the old temporary staging installation destination.
I changed www.wpthemespeed.com to point to softduit.com
Or so I thought.
The plugin ran, but apparently doesn’t work as well as it used to run or something.
Fast forward to today doing some page optimization
So today, I was working on an old blog article from 2007. It was a quick mention of a cloud service called MindMeister that I had written about as a beta tester way back then. I ran a speed test on the old post and about broke webpagetest.org!
Come to find out I had a broken image url somewhere on the page. I believe it was in a Related Post powered by a plugin so the same image did not show up on every page load. WebPageTest.org got lucky and found the one thumbnail with an image that was still pointing to www.wpthemespeed.com
So this time, I went into Better Search and Replace and ran the same domain name substitution search. (Be careful using this one, it is powerful and can make changes in places you may not want changes made!!!)
I threw caution to the wind (because I had backups, and have worked with this plugin and its predecessor about a million and five times.) and ran the update, changing about 1900 different items in the database.
My blog post, which was really totally inconsequential, went from loading in 99 seconds or 19 seconds depending on the run, to running in 1.5-3.5 seconds! 🙂
I’m not giving myself a big clap on the back for that ‘on page optimization’ after all, I only fixed a borked image link. But then again, I didn’t just fix one broken link, I fixed a couple thousand all at once. Odds are, I just improved page performance on a whole mess of my blog articles.
So I am happy about that!
Waxing Philosophical on our WordPress Service and Support
Sometimes when we are running service and support on a site (even our own) we find something the small. We might thing that a single broken image link is not the biggest problem, especially when its on a blog post from 2007. Yet sometimes those little inconsequential problems are tip offs to bigger challenges that we just have not found yet!
We can never do everything. We can work to not ignore things out of habit and follow our instincts and dig into issues to understand their cause, not just their symptom. When we do this, we can often make big improvements based on very small tips!
If you are looking for someone to provide great service and support for your WordPress powered website, we’d love to do some work for you. We are not talking coding, we’re just talking about making things work and run and perform better. We’re talking about helping your website rise to the level of its real potential.