Creating a WordPress Staging Environment

As a WordPress site owner, maintaining site performance is crucial, and making changes to your site without testing can lead to unwanted errors or issues for your WordPress site visitors. One powerful tool that can help with this is a staging environment for your WordPress site, also known as a test site or development site, where you can experiment and test changes before making them live. In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of creating a staging environment for your WordPress site.

Why a Staging Environment is Necessary

Creating a staging environment for your WordPress site can provide multiple benefits, such as:

• Identifying and addressing potential issues without affecting website visitors
• Testing new themes, plugins, and updates in a safe environment
• Quickly identifying and fixing coding conflicts, security issues, or bugs without impacting users

Method 1: Using a WordPress Plugin

This first method is ideal for beginners with limited coding skills, and it involves using a WordPress plugin to create a staging environment:

1. Install and activate the plugin
2. Click on “Create a Staging Site” after activating the plugin
3. Select where you want to make an exact copy of your website from the available menus
4. Wait for a short period to access the copy

Method 2: Creating a Staging Environment on Your Web Host

This second method requires technical knowledge and is more reliable with greater control and flexibility over your site.

Step 1: Create a Subdomain or Subdirectory

Create a subdomain or subdirectory where the staging environment will be set up. The subdomain will have a unique name and URL that identifies it as the staging environment for your WordPress site.

Step 2: Install WordPress on Your Staging Environment

After creating the subdomain or subdirectory, proceed to install WordPress in the newly created subdomain or subdirectory. You can do this by using the ‘Softaculous’ app installer option in your web host control panel.

Step 3: Copy Your Live Website Content to Your Staging Environment

The next step is to copy the content from your live WordPress site to the new staging environment. You can either use a plugin (like Duplicator) or transfer the files manually via the File Manager in your hosting control panel.

Step 4: Test Your Staging Environment

After copying your live WordPress site content to your new staging environment, check everything is working correctly by testing your site. Run a speed test, check theme and plugin functionality, and verify that all pages, text, and media display correctly.

Step 5: Launch Your Staging Site

After testing and ensuring that everything works as expected, you can proceed with migrating the changes from the staging environment to the live environment using either a manual migration, plugin, or automatic deployment.

Conclusion

A staging environment is essential for testing changes and experimenting with new features without affecting your website visitors’ experience. Whether you choose to use a WordPress plugin or create a staging environment on your web host, the benefits of following these steps outlined in this guide can help ensure that your site remains secure, efficient, and user-friendly.