How to Update Genesis Sample Child Theme while preserving the original?-/404

[sheese]

Hello!

When I moved my site to WordPress in 2016, someone set up a Genesis Sample site for me with customizations to make it look like my old site. It also has some functions/scripts that are critical to my site's functionality in the functions file. As such, I am not confident about touching it or updating it. So far, I hadn't run into theme-related problems, so I haven't had the need to update the child theme. I have only updated Genesis Framework.

However, in December, my category and tags archive pages became blank (white screen). I ended up downloading an archive.php page I found online, uploaded it to my Genesis Sample child theme folder, and that worked to fix the issue.

Since that same time, I have been running into a strange problem where existing pages on my site sometimes, and seemingly quite randomly, throw 404 errors. My site is thousands of pages big, so it's hard to find or track, but multiple people have written with the problem and I have seen it myself. Sometimes, I can be working on a page in admin, press View Page, and see a 404. The page still exists, and clearing the cache brings it back.

I assume that it's a theme-related problem because it cropped up around the same time I lost the category and tag archive page functionality, but I can't be certain. I have some Cloudflare browser and edge caching going on, so I assume that if someone sees a 404 page, that page might be served to other users.

My goal is to update my child theme Genesis Sample from its version 2.1.2 but I don't want to lose the customizations that are critical to the look and functionality of the site.

Is there a way to download the latest Genesis Sample, upload it with a new name, example Genesis Custom, and then try it out while preserving the one I currently have on the site? Would there be a conflict if I do that? Can I have two versions of Genesis Sample side by side without it throwing errors? I am nervous about doing so and losing something in the process.

The new Genesis Sample files look so different than the ones I have that I cannot figure out how to simply update my current one even if I wasn't nervous about trying.

Thank you so much for any possible insight you can provide.

[AnitaC]

Without seeing the site and knowing what customizations were made it would be difficult to advise you. But if I were you I would create a staging of the site and test out everything there.

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[sheese]

Thanks so much for your response. I have never done it but I will try the staging idea and see how it goes!

[Author]

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