How to Safely Hand Back a WordPress Site After Development Work

When developers work on an inherited WordPress site in a local or staging environment, test content, debug plugins, temporary users, and development settings can accidentally be pushed to the live production site during deployment. To prevent this, developers should categorize every change made into items that belong in production and those that are dev-only leftovers before deploying. Dev-only items such as test posts, debug plugins, temporary admin accounts, and settings like disabled caching or blocked search engine indexing must be cleaned up from the development copy first. Critical checks before going live include taking a fresh production backup, reviewing database changes for new user submissions, and ensuring debug logs are deleted so sensitive file paths are not publicly accessible. After deployment, developers should verify the live site's search engine indexing settings and flush permalink rules to avoid broken URLs.
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