When setting the page header background as an image, the theme sets the absolute path to the image. We recently moved our staging environment to another hosting provider, and in order to get our staging environment to work, we had to change all of these image paths to the new staging URL. It looks like we’re going to have to do this again when we go live with the site.
I was able to set relative image paths manually, but the file loading these images must be in a subdirectory, because I had to prefix the relative URLs with “../”.
I thought this is something you should be aware of. Anyone setting up a new site in a staging environment that uses header images is going to have to do this when deploying.
Actually, the problem seems to be even worse. Setting the relative URL prefixed with “../” isn’t sufficient to stop the edit page from trying to reference 150×150 thumbnails which have absolute URLs pointing to the old staging site. In fact, when we remove the header background image URL completely, for some reason the edit page still references these thumbnails from the old staging site. It appears as though setting a new absolute path for the header background image, saving, and then setting a relative path works, but I suspect we’ll run into problems again when we go live.
When moving the site from stage to live and vice-versa, you will need to move all the folders of the wordpress installation, images folder as well. Also you will need to import old database to your new host and update it by resetting all urls. So this is all you need to keep in mind regarding the images as well. The image folder should be present and just changes the old url’s in the database to the new ones. You can do such transitions easy by using a plugin such as “WP Migrate DB“.
