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3 Best Ways To Create A WordPress Staging Site For Testing

best ways to create a wordpress staging site for testing

Most of the bloggers use WordPress in their website, as it is very easy to use without any technical knowledge.

For a blogger who is coming out with his new WordPress website, he can do as much as testing on his live site as it might not have a huge traffic.

But for a blogger who is very popular or who is getting huge traffic might be a bad idea to test any changes in his live site, as downtime can have a severe effect.

So in today’s blog I would like to recommend 3 best ways through which you can create a staging site and do your testing without affecting your live site.

Method 1: Choose a hosting which offers staging feature

The other 2 methods which I am going to discuss might not need your hosting to support staging feature, but it is very easy to create a staging site if your host itself offers it.

Many of the hosting site provides staging site feature and also make sure that:

  1. Your live site is not getting affected from SEO perspective. It is because your host will make sure that the staging site content is not getting crawled by search engines and hence no duplicate issue.
  2. Offers backup of your staging site when it is made live, which helps you with more security.
  3. Make your staging site is going live with just one click of a button without troubling you with many other technical formalities.

Here are some of the hosting providers which will help you by proving staging site in WordPress:

  1. Kinsta
  2. WP Engine
  3. SiteGround

Here are 2 other methods which might help you if there is no staging feature in your hosting provider:

Method 2: Make use of WP Staging plugin

WP Staging is a freemium plugin which will help you with a staging site. As mentioned, it is a freemium plugin – which means it has both free and paid features.

The limitation with the free feature is that you cannot make your staging site live with just one click. You need to make all the changes manually again when you make the site live. In Order to avoid this manual work you can go ahead and purchase its premium plan.

Here are the steps on how to use the free version of the WP Staging plugin:

  1. Make sure you are creating the backup of your site, before you install and activate the plugin.
  2. Create a staging site by giving it a proper name.
  3. Start cloning by clicking on the available option and with in few minutes you will be taken to the staging site.
  4. To access the staging site, you need to login with the same WordPress credentials of your live site.
  5. Now you can make changes to your staging site. Never worry about any duplicate issue, as the plugin will make sure that search engines are not crawling your staging site.

Method 3: Manually create a staging site using Duplicator plugin

The 3rd method which I am going to recommend is bit technical and difficult to implement, compared to the above 2 methods.

Here are the steps you need to follow:

  1. Create a subdomain under your main domain where you can create your staging site.
  2. Use Duplicator plugin to make the copy of your live site into the staging site.
  3. Make sure this staging site is not crawled by search engines by adding no index tag to it.

Conclusion

Out of the 3 methods I mentioned above, the most recommended method is to choose a hosting which will provide a feature for staging site.

Have you ever tried making changes to your existing website using a staging site? What was your experience?

Please feel free to mention your comments below.

Happy learning 🙂

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