Background of the issue:
The main language of my site is German, and I need to create a separate site with only the English language. I want to remove the domain alias and create it as a standalone domain. I need both sites to retain all customers, orders, and products in their respective languages. I want to achieve this without using WPML.
Symptoms:
I tried various solutions but none of them worked fine.
Questions:
Is there someone willing to take care of creating two separate sites without WPML?
How can I split the site into two separate domains while retaining all customers, orders, and products?
Separating your site into two standalone domains while preserving all customers, orders, and products in their respective languages is not straightforward without using WPML. WPML stores all language information in the database specific to your installation and is designed to make your website multilingual.
Here are a couple of ideas you might consider to achieve this:
1. Manual Site Duplication and Language Cleanup
This method involves duplicating your existing site and then removing unnecessary content from each version to keep only the relevant information.
2. Using WP All Export / WP All Import
You can use these tools to export and import only the relevant products, orders, and customer data for each site.
I think that the best solution to extract the english is as follows:
1- Register a dummy website and create it my Plesk (already done)
2- Duplicate the installation (done)
3- Copy the english text of the pages in the main language (german). In my case they are only 5 or 6 (I am doing it)
4- Export the english texts of the products from the original website and upload them in the german products of the clone (I will also keep the permalinks saved apart).
5- Copy the english text of the categories into the German language (not a lot in my case)
6- Deactivate the secondary languages and then deactivate and remove WPML
This way I should still have the main language of the site (german) but now the texts are in english.
7- Switch to English in the wordpress settings
What do you think? I should not lose anything in this way. If I switch the main language in WPML happens a disaster if I remove the other languages and then remuve WPML.
By the way, you can now set this issue as public, if it can help somebody.
Now I was able to get a standalone website in English, with the same permalinks of the alias I had under WPML. It is on a temporary webspace created in Plesk. I can now delete the alias and rename the Plesk webspace.
It was not a big website (less than 500 products), in any case this workflow can be a quite good solution for extracting a secondary language and create a standalone site also for bigger ecommerces. All Import and All Export are needed, otherwise you have to set the slugs again from within the database.
Clients and order are all present and untouched.
Please put this issue as public, it could be useful.
