Creating a WordPress staging website: a comprehensive walkthrough

In the world of website management, making changes to a live site can be a nerve-wracking experience. One wrong move, and you could find yourself dealing with conflicts, errors, and even website downtime – a situation that no one wants to encounter. This is where staging websites come into play.

A staging website is essentially a clone of your live website, used for testing changes and previews before they are implemented on the live site. It's like a rehearsal space for your website, where you can experiment without the risk of messing up the live show.

For those who don't have the luxury of a hosting provider offering testing functions, there are solutions available. WordPress plugins like WP-Staging or WP StageCoach can be a lifesaver, allowing you to set up a test website within your admin panel.

SiteGround, a popular managed hosting provider specialising in WordPress websites, also offers an easy solution. With SiteGround, you can set up a staging website in mere minutes. All you need to do is add your existing website on your hosting plan to the staging module in your account.

Manually setting up a test website can be a more technical approach, involving creating a new subdomain, creating an FTP account, downloading existing WordPress files, uploading them to the staging server, creating a temporary database, and updating the wp-config.php file with new credentials. But with SiteGround, the process is streamlined, making it easy for non-technical users.

Implementing updates or changes directly on a live website can have negative consequences, affecting user experience and SEO. By using a staging website, you can avoid website crashes and downtime due to conflicting plugins and major updates.

Moreover, SiteGround delivers fast loading speeds for your website as a managed hosting service, with features like CDN, SSL, website security, automated backups, and more covered with each plan.

Using a staging website also allows you to preview all major updates, plugins, new destination pages, updated menus, and a variety of other changes before publishing. This ensures that your live site always remains functional and visually appealing.

In conclusion, whether you choose to use a plugin, a manual method, or SiteGround's one-click solution, setting up a staging website is a crucial step in maintaining a smooth and efficient website management process. It's like having a safety net for your live site, giving you the confidence to experiment and innovate without the fear of breaking something.

Creating a WordPress staging website: a comprehensive walkthrough