Hey, I don’t see PHPspew on your prod IP or the domain root url, I see a basic Wordpress site. Is that new since posting above?

I’m wondering what WP tool you’re using to snapshot your staging site. What about a Droplet snapshot of your staging, restored onto a larger production Droplet, could that work for your intended workflow?

then pushed that snapshot to a new WP 18.04 droplet.

With simple Droplets, all you need to do with a snapshot is Create Droplet from it. You can do the same with Wordpress but a few configs need to be updated after the restore onto a new IP / host / url. To clarify, theres’ no need to create a WP 18.04 and then restore, the snapshot is a full restore. Assuming that’s what you meant, then the config to be updated for Wordpress moving to a new IP address and new host is found in the wordpress db in the wp_options table. Those must be updated.

Following this article I’ve done that to one Wordpress Droplet recently, using these steps; https://stackoverflow.com/questions/535534/wordpress-host-ip-changed

–Get the root mysql password

more /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf .digitalocean_password 

–Connect to the database

mysql -u root -p 
<enter the password from above>

change to the wordpress db

use wordpress

–Check the wpoptions for siteurl and home

mysql> Select * from wp_options where option_name IN('siteurl','home'); 

–Update those to my new values

update wp_options set option_value='http://example.com' where option_name = 'siteurl';
update wp_options set option_value='http://example.com' where option_name = 'home';

–Restart the Droplet, wait a few minutes for it to come up, and the site should be up and running on your new host.

Good luck!