Month: <span>August 2018</span>

Posted on August 4, 2018November 28, 2018 by Halicarnassian — Leave a comment

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 3

Site Security, WordPress Shopping Cart Setup, Styling

Blocked all other IPs with HTACCESS until the Ancient Greek Keyboard site was ready to go live.
Added short product description & product image for side navbar widgets.
Added product name for all “Add To Cart” buttons.
Experienced more difficulty with final styling of side navbar widgets due to caching. Must turn off caching in cPanel with the Supercaching tool for style changes to be applied.
Activated several plugins and matched their settings to that of the development site.

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 2

Live WordPress Site Synchronized To Development Site

Logged into WP.
Matched live site settings (on AncientGreekKeyboard.com) to that of development site.
Additional HTACCESS security.
Installed Storefront theme.
Deleted all other themes.
Uploaded Child Theme with HTTP URLs commented out.
Uploaded background images to Media Library.
Stylesheet updated to use live site’s background images (ie: so that site does not use development site images).
Installed & activated WP Google Fonts plugin & set H1 tags to Caesar Dressing font.
Experienced caching problem while trying to style the top logos. Later discovered this was a host caching issue, and had to be fixed with cPanel.
Copied & pasted all pages from development site to live site.
Set menu & submenus.
Uploaded & inserted media to pages (ie: so that pages load images from HTTPS source).
Deleted unneeded plugins & installed required plugins.
Discovered several countries were trying to access the site within the last 24 hours despite ROBOTS.TXT request not to index the site.
Activated HTML sitemap plugin.
Set up HTML Sitemap page. Did not index 14 (Cancelled Transaction), 16 (Checkout) and 27 (Thank You) pages.
Activated Contact Form 7 plugin & set up Contact form.
Set up widgets.

In retrospect, it would take less time to use the Duplicator plugin or the Migrator tool from cPanel to copy the development site over to the live site.

(Though the advantage of manual migration is that problems can be more easily dealt with one at a time. And for a small site, the process is not too unwieldy.)

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 1

Domain & Host Registration, WordPress Installation, Email & SSL Setup

I. Registrar (Namecheap.com)

Set up account & contact information.
Purchased domain name (AncientGreekKeyboard.com).
Turned off Parking Page.

II. Hosting Company (SiteGround.com)

Set up account & contact information.
Set up cPanel & FTP passwords.
Located DNS records for hosted site.

III. Registrar

Pasted DNS address from the hosting company into the Custom DNS nameservers.
Clicked checkmark to save the new DNS addresses.

IV. Hosting Company

Reviewed online directions for installing WordPress manually.
Accessed cPanel.
Downloaded WordPress installation ZIP file. Unzipped it.
Set up WordPress database & recorded database credentials.
Added these credentials to WP-CONFIG.PHP and saved the file.
Uploaded WordPress files & folders to Host.
Manually installed WordPress.
Logged into WordPress.
Installed & activated the Coming Soon plugin.
Set up email accounts on cPanel.
1. Accessed cPanel.
2. Mail > Email Accounts
3. Set up email address, password, size.
4. Created email account.
5. Beside new account, clicked More > Access Webmail.
6. Chose Default Webmail Application.
7. Sent email configuration information to a different email address.
8. Tested email to make sure it was working correctly.
Set up SSL on WordPress
1. Activated SSL with “Let’s Encrypt” on cPanel.
2. Forced SSL login via code in WP-CONFIG.PHP.
3. Uploaded WP-CONFIG.PHP.
4. Logged into WP and updated WordPress Address (URL) & Site Address (URL) to HTTPS.
5. Installed & activated Velvet Blues Update URLs plugin.
6. Clicked “UPDATE URLS” link & updated links on WP from HTTP to HTTPS.
7. Used HTACCESS to redirect HTTP to HTTPS.
8. Verified Permalinks were set to HTTPS & were using the desired format.
9. Verified that HTTP links on the site were correctly redirecting to HTTPS.
10. Manually updated STYLE.CSS so that background images loaded from HTTPS rather than the development site (Did this on Day 2).

UPDATE: In hindsight, the following actions should have been performed on this day:

HTACCESS should have been set at this point to deny access to the site to everyone but myself until the the site was ready to go live.
The WWW version of the site should have been created instead of the non-WWW version. (The site must be WWW if it is ever configured for Cloudflare.)

Month: August 2018

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 3

Site Security, WordPress Shopping Cart Setup, Styling

Other posts in this series:

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 2

Live WordPress Site Synchronized To Development Site

Other posts in this series:

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 1

Domain & Host Registration, WordPress Installation, Email & SSL Setup

Other posts in this series: