Advice for building a new webshop for an existing store

Hi All, I posted my question earlier in the forum of my Language but it doesn’t seem very active. So, I will try it here. I hope I can get some advice here.

For an active webshop I would like to start building a new website in OpenCart. But I can’t do it on that active domain and if I do it with on another temporarily domain, I get double content what doesn’t work for the search engines.

What is the best way to do that (online)? Maybe there is a way that I can block all IP except mine and is it “easy” to move the website is when it is ready to use?

create a robots.txt in the site root

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

that should disable all the crawlers from indexing your site

you should also try to keep your SEO url structure the same for the new webshop so after you go live you dont have loads of 404's

OlivierNL wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 12, 2019 6:01 pm

Hi All, I posted my question earlier in the forum of my Language but it doesn’t seem very active. So, I will try it here. I hope I can get some advice here.

For an active webshop I would like to start building a new website in OpenCart. But I can’t do it on that active domain and if I do it with on another temporarily domain, I get double content what doesn’t work for the search engines.

What is the best way to do that (online)? Maybe there is a way that I can block all IP except mine and is it “easy” to move the website is when it is ready to use?

If you're going to create this using a new domain, you can block all IP addresses except yours by adding this to your .htaccess as soon as you install a new copy:

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from <your ip> (get your actual IP address by going to Google and doing a search 'what's my ip address' and it will pop up)

Also, add this to the header file of your new install only:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

Google is very curious about every site so even though the robots.txt file has Disallow: / they often ignore it and crawl anyways. The above two methods are the only ways I've found to stop them from indexing anything.

Thank you!

so, if I installed the new website on a different domain it is no problem to move it to another domain?

OlivierNL wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 13, 2019 12:09 am

Thank you!

so, if I installed the new website on a different domain it is no problem to move it to another domain?

You'll need to update both config.php files. If you're trying to merge any customers, products and/or orders into the new store, that gets a bit harder but it's completely doable.