If you’re looking for a safe way to develop or work on your WordPress website so you can make changes and see the results without effecting your live website you should consider using a staging site.
What Is A Staging Site?
A staging site is a fully functional independent clone of your website that you can work on without effecting the live site before merging the changes back to your live production website.
Working on a live website can be risky business. If something goes wrong or breaks and your website goes down, even for a short time it, can be disastrous. Particularly if your website is your livelihood and main source of income.
Using a staging site allows you to make code and functionality changes, implement design and theme changes, edit content, update or install new plugins, upgrade your WordPress version, or anything else in a separate area without effecting your live website. This way you can ensure everything is fully tested and working properly before pushing the changes to your live site.
Some managed WordPress web hosts such as WPEngine include staging functionality as part of their service. However if your webhost doesn’t provide a staging facility there’s a great new staging service for all WordPress websites no matter what host you’re using – WP Stagecoach.
WP Stagecoach
WP Stagecoach is a new service that allows you to easily make a WordPress staging website with one-click. WP-Stagecoach lets you create a staging copy of your WordPress website so you don’t have to develop on your live site. With one click you can then merge the changes back to your live website.
WP Stagecoach includes the following features:
- Create a staging copy of your live site with one click
- Copy changes from your staging site back to your live site
- Choose which changes to import. You can import some or all of your file changes, and/or your database changes
- Password-protect your staging site
- SFTP access to your staging site
- Staging site runs on our server – no need to set up hosting for your staging site
- Revert file changes if importing from your staging site doesn’t go as expected
- SSL enabled on all staging sites
Pricing
WP Stagecoach offer a couple of different plans starting from just $4/month for a single site.
Wrap Up
If you’re building a new website or making changes and updates to your WordPress site no matter how big or small, WP Stagecoach is a valuable service. It provides an easy and convenient way to create a staging site for your WordPress website.
WP Stagecoach should be compatible with most web hosts, plugins, and themes but there are some known incompatibilities you should be aware of before signing up. Check out their FAQ section and the WP Stagecoach demo video to see WP Stagecoach in action.
To learn more and set up a WordPress staging site go to wpstagecoach.com
