Cost me thousands of dollars to repair the mess WPvivid caused.
I bought the WPvivid plugin so I could create a fresh install of a wordpress site on a staging platform and then push it live when I was ready. It was a huge mistake and I cannot say strongly enough that everyone should avoid this plugin.
The early part of working with the plugin functioned really well. As a small-business owner without the budget to hire someone to do this work, it let me build a site I was happy with and that was technologically much better than my old site that had become a patchwork of plugins over time.
And then I got to the day when I pushed the staging site to live. And that's where the trouble began.
Their documentation boasts about the "one-click" ability to push a site to live. But it's not accurate at all. What I *should* have known is that it would only transfer over new plugins and overwrite existing databases. I say *should* because nowhere in the help documentation does it say that this is what happens. The documentation makes it sound like your new site will replace your old site. Instead, what I ended up with was a messy merge of the old site and the new one together. Those old plugins that were causing a mess on my site? Installed into the new one too. Those old media files? Merged into the new media folder. Links on the pages of the site? Many needed to be updated to the correct public domain because they were stuck pointing to the staging site pages.
Tech support offered me a 2-prong solution. They offered a secondary plugin to help fix the issue of the extra media files on the server, but in using it, the supposed solution created an even bigger problem deleting the majority of images that were in active use on my new website. This cost several days of going through the site to figure out which images were missing (both visible and the more hidden open graph images that required manual verification).
And then they offered a solution for the merging of the sites rather than overwriting. But it was so technologically complex that I didn't know how to do what they were asking. They don't provide step-by-step guidance, but rather just high level steps. Even though they say that their plugin is beginner-friendly, their tech support will only interact with you as one web developer to another. In the end, I had to hire someone to transfer my staging site to my main domain at a cost much greater than the original plugin. But I still paid for the plugin that didn't do its job properly.
WPvivid offered me a refund. But it was a slight-of-hand trick. They provided a link where I had to make the formal request so it would go to their billing department. It was in the days leading up to the winter holiday when I was out of office and so I filled out the form as soon as I got back in January. Only to be met with "sorry, we're not giving you a refund, you didn't request it within 30 days." Because the fine print in their terms and conditions says the request for a refund only counts if you submit the form within 30 days, not if you request a refund with the tech support person you are working with. And when they told me to fill out the form, they didn't offer the level of transparency of "fill this out before X date because our terms and conditions need you to do that."
The whole process, from the plugin not working as advertised to the terrible customer service makes me urge you to choose any other plugin but this one for your website update needs.