How to Create a Staging Site in Wordpress
It's time for your daily dose of Wordpress Wisdom! In today's quick tutorial I'll show you how to set up a staging site in Wordpress. Sometimes we are looking to make some wide-scale edits to our website and we get worried about maybe messing something up or having something come out looking weird and then "Oh no! My live website is messed up until I fix it!"
Not to worry! By creating a staging site you can create an exact copy of your full website, all the way down to all its content, plugins, customizations, everything, and place it on a separate siterubix domain where you can do anything you like to it without affecting the live website.
Then, when all your changes are in place, you can easily use the Move function to move your staging site over to your main domain and just like that your website is successfully updated!
As always, please feel free to share this video to anyone needing help with this. If you have any Wordpress related questions that you'd like to see me create a tutorial around feel free to send me a private message or leave me a message on my profile.
If you want to check out all my Wordpress Wisdom tutorials you can go to the WA smart search up top (magnifying glass) and type in "Wordpress Wisdom" or just head over to my blog.
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Recent Comments
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This is super cool! I'm going to do exactly this for my main niche site because I purchased a GeneratePress license and want to play around with customizing it before I ditch the current "free" theme I'm using. It would be awesome if this could eventually be an option we could click in Site Manager vs opening a ticket. Feature request?? 😉
One question... When you "move" the staging site to your primary domain, does it also copy & replace all content? In other words, if I change and/or add content in the staging site, does all that get copied over and overwrite everything on the main site? I'm assuming yes, but want to be sure I understand the process. lol
So, no issues with search engine indexing or SEO when we do this? The only reason I ask is because I did use the "Move" feature with one of my domains, and it still shows the SiteRubix domain in the SiteContent tool (under the Status column) for all posts/pages I created prior to moving the site to my actual domain.
When you use the Move feature theres a note to not delete the original site for like 30 days, then you can delete it if you like.
I have another question for you. You say the staging site would be a siterubix domain. That being the case would I be able to add a premium theme? I have just started working with Bricks Builder (a theme) and I would like to rebuild one of my existing websites with Bricks. Would this be possible?
I did this exact thing a while back when I changed my theme on my main site.
You could create a staging site, then on that staging site change up the theme and start fixing areas where it naturally becomes wonky after a theme change. And yes, a staging site can hold a premium theme without issue.
You'll be good to go since your main website is untouched while you work out the kinks of the newly themed site. Then, when you're done, you can use the move function to move the finished product from the staging site over from to the frontline domain. :)
So, after you use the move function, is your staging site still available to do additional or future changes?
Thanks Eric!
You'd use the move function once you're done with the staging site. At that point it's basically being redirected to your main domain and is live.
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Hey Eric, I was thinking about this... Couldn't we just create our own staging site by creating a free SiteRubix site and then using one of the many backup/migrate plugins (such as UpdraftPlus) to migrate our main site to the "staging" site? I found a post from Carson essentially explaining this method, but it's 5 years old. 😊 Is this still supported?
Sure, if we didn’t have access to site support to do it for us, then yes. But since we got them, definitely use them 👍🏼 They’re quick with it and makes it a breeze.
It turns out all backup plugins are blacklisted on the WA platform now. So Site Support is definitely the way to go! 😊