This may not be for you. I have one site where there can be several changes going on at the same time by different developers. I also use git. To manage this I have multiple dev/staging/testing sites. A specific change is only done on one of these sites. In your case, each branch would equal another dev site, reusing dev sites for different purposes as branches are merged. There was a lot I needed to learn about .gitignore to accomplish this. Basically, in my case, the root of git is the root of the site and I ignore all of the WP files and anything else that will be updated through the normal update process while any file on the server that could might need changing is part of the repo. I needed to do this to include custom PHP files in folders off the root as well as include the theme and specific custom plugins for WP. It’s really complicated, but the only way I could figure out how to accomplish letting multiple devs work on different changes and only pushing specific changes to the live site.
