3 Things You can Do With a WordPress Staging Site

A concept which is unfortunately unfamiliar to many WordPress business owners is that of a staging site. Before we proceed any further, we want you to know that having a WordPress staging site is a total game-changer. By the time you finish reading this article, you'll fully understand why. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, and instead start where we must; At the beginning. The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language defines staging as follows:

(noun) A temporary platform or system of platforms used for support; scaffolding. (With added emphasis).

The word staging refers to an ephemeral place. It is not a place that is built to last. Within the context of WordPress, a staging site is a temporary WordPress site. This may seem like a silly idea at first, but consider that such a temporary site is effectively a playground wherein you can tweak a copy of your real WordPress site. Now this concept is getting some teeth. Making changes at a temporary location can save your precious WordPress site from potential catastrophe!

OK fine, that's admittedly exaggerated. But if you've ever created a copy of a Microsoft(R) Word document prior to making changes to it, then you already have an intuition for what a WordPress staging site can do for you; In short, a staging site can save your bacon. Let's dive in and see how this actually plays out in the real world, by looking at three things you can do with a WordPress staging site.

a staging site can save your bacon

-- Ghost Host

No. 1 - Try out a new WordPress theme

If you've ever swapped out the WordPress theme on your site you've probably experienced what we'll politely call an existential crisis, as you watched all your responsive tweaks, carefully-selected fonts, and other various alignments, vanish as fast as Grandma's homemade cookies. Unless you have used a staging site before, you may have come to think that this is just the way it is; That theme changes are an emotional roller-coaster much like a regrettable love affair. Well, boy do we have some good news for you! What if we told you that you can take that beautiful new WordPress theme and safely test it out on your site.

The insight to take home is this: A staging site is an independent copy of your production WordPress site.

You could pretty much turn your entire staging site into a complete wreck, and it would have no effect whatsoever on your real WordPress site. Let that sink in, as you realize the opportunities this opens up for you. Obviously if you try a WordPress theme and it doesn't work out to you liking, you can simply remove it. But with a staging site not only can you do this, you can do so without your customers even knowing.

In addition, if your site needs a bit of tweaking to better integrate with the new theme, you can implement these changes incrementally, in secret. And perhaps most importantly, if at the end of the day it just doesn't work out, you don't have go through the process of undoing everything because the production site remained unchanged; Just clone your production site to your staging site, and you have a clean slate to start anew. And in case you're wondering, yes, this applies to plugins too!

With a staging site can incrementally update your WordPress theme, in secret.

-- Ghost Host

No. 2 - Safely evaluate/test a plugin

Just as you can safely try out a new WordPress theme using a staging site, you can also test a WordPress plugin. The benefits of a staging site being a separate site altogether really comes into play with plugins because plugins can make more intrusive changes which are difficult to roll back cleanly. A staging site provides a safe haven where you can test a plugin without risking your production site. A subtle benefit of using a staging site to test plugins, is that you can practice using the plugin, ensuring that you get a deeper understanding of its inner-workings before you make a long-term commitment.

Speaking of testing plugins, consider the following: If your intent is to try out numerous similar plugins and then ultimately choose one, we highly recommend that you begin each test with a freshly-created staging site. This will help ensure that any changes made to your staging site by a plugin you are evaluating, are effectively reverted and don't interfere with any additional plugins you test.

A staging site provides a safe haven where you can test a plugin without risking your production site.

-- Ghost Host

Thus far you have learned about using a staging site to try out themes and plugins, but there's also a higher-level benefit of using a staging site. A staging site grants you the ability to make comparisons between your existing production WordPress site and the changes you have planned to make.

No. 3 - Compare planned changes to your existing production site

Let's say you want to make some changes to your site's layout to improve the aesthetics and mobile responsiveness. If you make the changes directly to your production WordPress site, you'd have to rely on prior screenshots or video recordings to evaluate the changes. Otherwise, how would you know whether you've made an improvement or not? In addition, the incomplete changes would be immediately visible to your customers. In contrast, by staging the changes you can compare them side-by-side in real-time to the production WordPress site; A staging site has an auto-generated domain name you can use to access it.

By using a staging site you can iterate, bit by bit, making direct comparisons against the production site as you steadily move forward. Imagine how this can supercharge your workflow! In fact, you can extend this concept further when you consider the fact that a staging site is made available online at a different domain name than your production site. Which brings us to...

No. 4 - BONUS: Demonstrate your upcoming changes to friends, colleagues, etc

On second thought, there's actually one more epic thing you can do with a WordPress staging site.

Suppose you have meticulously made improvements to your site using a staging site. Everything is ready to go and you're about to pull your changes into your production site. And... you start having second thoughts. Your gut starts twisting like a washing machine, giving you the impression something just isn't right. Ever been there? Well, you may recall that a staging site is indeed a real website living its life out there on the Internet; Technically a staging site can be hosted locally on your computer, but that's an article for another day.

There's nothing stopping you from copy-pasting the staging site URL and giving it to someone else. It really is that easy to share your work with that someone you trust to give you the much-needed advice that you're looking for. Nice right? The staging site behaves pretty much the same way as your production site. For example, let's say a friend of yours created an account on your production site before you cloned it to your staging site. That account would exist on your staging site! Therefore, you can have your friend log in to your staging site and take a look around.

There's nothing stopping you from copy-pasting the staging site URL and giving it to someone else.

-- Ghost Host

A caveat worth mentioning is that because a staging site has a domain name that's different from a production site, and you don't get to choose the domain name, functionality which depends on the production domain name, such as WebHooks, will not work correctly on a staging site without additional changes.

Next steps

Now that you have a sense of the capabilities of a staging site and what it can do for you, you may be interested in learning more about how to incorporate a staging site into your workflow. If so, take a look at How to Use a WordPress Staging Site.

With our WordPress hosting solution, we aim stay out of your way so that you focus on the things which make your business thrive. Our online staging site functionality is just one of many powerful features included in our deluxe hosting plan. If you're hungry for more information about what our WordPress hosting plan can do for you, click here.