Development Mode and Switching your Site to ‘Live’
When you are provisioning your WordPress site using the Control Panel, “Enable development mode” is selected by default.
Selecting Development Mode during site provisioning
If you leave this selected, your website will be set-up with a custom URL specific to your website – for example:
The purpose of development mode is to allow you to view your site and login to WP-Admin before making it live for the public to see using the custom URL.
NB: Whilst in development mode, WordPress will use the custom URL for all links and image references. See below for what to do when you are ready to switch to live.
Ready to Switch to Live?
Once you are ready to make your site live, use the Control Panel to navigate to your “Connections” page for the site you need to switch to live and press the button “Switch to Live”
Our system will update WordPress so that it listens on the website address you entered during provisioning (e.g. www.example.com) and will do it’s best to automatically change all instances of www.example.com.wp.pendeopress.com in the database to www.example.com. You’ll want to test out a couple of links to ensure your live site is working – but you’ll need to update your DNS first – see below.
If you are having issues or you want to double check that all instances of the development URL have been changed, follow Step 6 on Migrating your WordPress Site and use the Interconnectit DB Search and Replace tool which is mentioned.
Changing your DNS
Once you’ve switched your site to live, you’ll need to update your DNS – you do this on your domain hosting providers Control Panel. You should create a CNAME record and point it to the custom URL e.g. www.example.com.wp.pendeopress.com
If you want to preview everything before changing your live DNS, you can create a local hosts entry on your machine to override the global DNS system. This will force only your computer to look at the new site, whilst everyone else will still be viewing the old site. We’ve created separate instructions here how to Create a local hosts file entry.
Related Links: