How To Easily Create a Staging Site In WordPress
Updated: 05/09/2022
Are you looking to create a staging site for WordPress but not sure where to start?
A WordPress staging site is a test site that you can use to “safely” make plugin updates and other changes before going live.
Before now, it used to be very difficult to setup a WordPress staging site, but that has changed now.
It is good practice to backup WordPress before you perform any major change to your website such as updating WordPress to the latest version or modifying a theme template. However, most of us are guilty of making quick changes to a live website to save time. Unfortunately, this can be risky.
When you update a WordPress plugin, there is always a chance that the update could crash your website. Even a minor change to a WordPress widget can cause significant problems at the front end of your website if you have not entered the code correctly.
This is why experienced WordPress website owners use a WordPress staging environment. A staging environment reduces the risk of something breaking on your live website.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to easily create a staging environment for your WordPress site using different methods.
What is a Staging Site?
A staging site is a clone of your live website that is used for testing changes before making them live. Staging sites help you catch errors, so you don’t end up breaking your live website.
A lot of users install WordPress locally on their Windows or Mac computers to test changes. Once they’re done with the updates, they simply upload those changes from localhost to live server
The biggest problem with this approach is what if something that worked on your localhost does not work on the live server?
Often localhost and live WordPress hosting servers are not running the same environment.
Since the staging site lives on your web hosting server, you can easily prevent all those errors because it runs the same server configuration as your live site.
Having said that, let’s take a look at how to create a staging site for WordPress.
How to Easily Create a WordPress Staging Site
There are several ways to create a staging site for WordPress. The easiest of them is to use your hosting provider’s built-in staging site feature.
Some of the best WordPress hosting companies already offer 1-click staging websites. If your website is hosted with one of them, then you can easily create a staging site.
If you’re not with one of these popular hosting solutions, then we also have a solution to help you create a WordPress staging site using a plugin or even manually.
In this tutorial, we will be using Namecheap as our hosting company.
Creating A Staging Site on Namecheap
Namecheap is one of the best WordPress hosting companies. They offer a quick 1-click staging site solution which comes with all their plans.
1.First, you need to login to your hosting account. Go to Softaculous, then open All Installations page to see your current website’s installations. See below:
2. Find the installation you want to create staging for and click on Create Staging.
3. Now fill in the respective details for your staging installation:
- The protocol
- The domain name in question
- The directory you wish to set for installation
- The database name
