AltDaily.com, a wildly popular local news website, came to us when they were ready to enhance their website. They wanted to update all of their plugins, the core WordPress installation itself and add some new functionality. Using a multi-stage process we were able to perform the work with practically no down time for the live website.

1Backup and Testing: Before proceeding with any major upgrade we always make a complete backup of the live site and create a duplicate on our development servers. This allows us to test all of the updates in a safe, non-production environment and work out any issues before attempting the update on the live servers.

2Adding New Features: The best time to test new features is while you’re working on the development server, so while we were testing the upgrades we went ahead with implementing optimized code and new functionality for AltDaily.

3Performing the Live Upgrade: After extensive testing on the development servers, we were ready to implement the new code on the live servers. We always schedule these for the lowest usage times and because we had already worked through all of the potential issues prior to the upgrade, we were able to complete it with negligible down time.

4Final Testing: After completing the upgrade and performing our own tests, we always ask the client to test everything fully as well. Everything checked out and the site was ready for more growth!