how to change wp theme in big sites?

I am in charge of SEO of a store website with more than 2000 pages and the template of this site has a technical problem, and the template I want to change, does anyone who has the experience of changing the template in big sites? If anyone has experience, please guide me. (This website has about 1700 clicks per day and has revenue and I do not want to mess with it)

@Valas - suggest to clone your site to a sandbox subdomain. make that sandbox sub-domain noindex.. .make all of your changes over there. once you are sure on the result, then do the same on the main site.

suggest to use updraftplus premium version: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/g...ess-plugin-latest-version-2-16-56-25.1324022/

Create a staging website. Some hosts have an option to do this in your Cpanel. If not then use a plugin called WP Staging. Make all changes on your staging website, check if the new theme is messing up with anything. In the end when everything looks good make your staging website live to replace your old website.

If the current template has been up for a long time and it works, I'd take a gradual approach to it.

When you do sudden big changes on established sites, it tells Google the site has changed completely, and they do some kind of "reset".

So the best way IMO is to take it gradually. What I do is create a child theme and leave the current one as parent. Or you can clone the theme into a different directory.

Make changes on the child theme, commit changes and test. Then proceed with new changes.

This way the child theme will end up being the complete new theme.

Or you can clone the theme and rename it, making changes as you go.

I wouldn't just switch on/off from theme to theme on a established site, it usually breaks lots of things and crawlers will detect the reset.

clone it on another server or locally. it's a hard work, if you're doing this clone locally, but you'll thank me later in the long run.
make needed changes to the clone.
apply the changes gradually to the live one.

do not attempt to do the change or the fix live. your worry will come true.

Simple site or Big site, Whatever the procedure is same. I have 7 years of experience in WordPress. Don't worry about this.. I think you are handling E-commerce site right?

1. Just Backup WP_Content and MySql Database (this is only for safety)

2. Upload your wp_theme_file.zip in wp_content/themes and extract here.. (cPanel)

3. Next login your WP dashboard. The theme is ready to activate.

I hope this helps you..

fb3003 said:

@Valas - suggest to clone your site to a sandbox subdomain. make that sandbox sub-domain noindex.. .make all of your changes over there. once you are sure on the result, then do the same on the main site.

suggest to use updraftplus premium version: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/g...ess-plugin-latest-version-2-16-56-25.1324022/

Click to expand...

This + NEVER do major updates/changes to your site before doing a backup of that site.

Must be a hectic process

1- full backup 2- Change Template