A WordPress staging site is basically a principal replica within your live website: same content, plugins, theme – except it’s an exclusive version that only you have. What are the advantages to this? Having a replica within your site enables you to run theme and plugin updates THERE, first, to make certain nothing breaks.
A WP staging site is considered as a sandbox. It’s where you could try out a myriad of tweaks without risking breaking your money site. And, in contrast to running a local development site, your WordPress staging site is while using exact same hardware as the live site, meaning anything that works on the staging is in fact guaranteed to focus on your live site.
To manually produce a WordPress staging site, you mainly have to duplicate all your site using a subdomain. Files are simple to transfer via cPanel File Manager or FTP, therefore, the only tricky thing you’ll ought to handle is the best database and serialization issues. That is, your database will initially contain references and links for a live site – you may need an easy way to update those references to suggest towards your staging site.
One thing you certainly don’t desire to happen is made for Search Engine to index your staging site. That’s a lot of duplicate content.
The WPStaging Pro is often a nifty little plugin that means that you can create an staging or development environment as part of your existing live site, immediately on your same hosting account. Basically it’s starting a subdirectory install for you personally, which can be really nice, since doing that manually may be complicated.
The Pro version lets you push and migrate plugins and themes and media files directly for a live site. However, for such things as core updates, you still have to redo those manually with your live site.
If possible, picking a host that has a built-in staging feature is best way to get having access to a WordPress staging site. For that, I suggest SiteGround or Kinsta, depending in your budget and ways in which many sites you ought to host.
If that isn’t an alternative, the WP Staging plugin offers another user-friendly method. Just remember that you should pay for the Pro edition to automatically design your staging site live.
And finally, if you'd like something that’s 100% free, you are able to use the Duplicator plugin. Just remember this method requires more manual work and is particularly technically complicated too.