Phil
(@fullysupportedphil)
Automattic Happiness Engineer
Most of the information that WooCommerce uses is in the database. This includes the version tracking of your WordPress and WooCommerce installations.
Restoring a site from an out of data database backup isn’t something that we would recommend. While it may work, you have a high potential for causing issues.
Additionally, since many plugins store their settings in the database – restoring an old database will essentially un-do any changes you’ve made.
Instead what I would recommend is to make your staging site. Once you have the staging site, perform your plugin updates to check for any conflict or issues. Once you’ve done that, you can then safely perform the same updates on your live site. At that point you’ll have an updated live site, with the same plugin versions that you can copy over to your staging environment, as needed.
Thanks Phil for the helpful reply. Those are important points I didn’t realize.
If I create a fresh server & WordPress installation, and then use the admin Tools > Import feature to import my old WordPress data, will that correctly import my WooCommerce data too? Will orders and products import? Also, will order numbers change?
Our current live server is running an older version of Ubuntu, PHP etc. Upgrading it in place has proven to be a real time consuming chore, with lots of dependencies to chase down. I am wondering if it would be easier to start with a fresh install. Retaining the WC data is critical though.
Phil
(@fullysupportedphil)
Automattic Happiness Engineer
While WooCommerce does make use of the WordPress database structure and existing tables, doing a WordPress Export/Import will not bring over all of your WooCommerce information.
If you wanted to transfer of all of your orders and matching customers, you’d want to look at a plugin like this one:
https://woocommerce.com/products/ordercustomer-csv-export/
Given that you’ll need to transfer all the information over though, a migration plugin would likely be an easier option. That way you can grab everything at once instead of doing WordPress information and WooCommerce information separately.
We don’t offer one of these plugins, but there are many third-party options. You can find several here on WordPress.org:
https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/search/migration/
That way you can migrate everything to the new site and then perform any updates you need there.
Hi there,
We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved – if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.
