Ever make an update to your WordPress site, have something go wrong, and backtrack in a panic trying to undo whatever you just did, knowing everyone can see the problem? It feels an awful lot like dealing with a “wardrobe malfunction”, scrambling to undo the damage while you try to keep people from seeing things that shouldn’t be seen.

This is why you want to make changes on a staging site first.

A staging site is a clone of your website that is not visible to the public. It lets you test things out in a safe place where there are no consequences for mistakes. If worst comes to worst, you can always wipe it all and start over with another copy of your live site, and no one will be the wiser.

It’s important for the staging site to be as similar as possible to your live website. That way you can be confident that when you’ve fixed a problem on your staging site, the same fix will work on your live site.

How do I make a staging site for a WordPress website?

First, check with your hosting company. Many have built-in tools in your control panel to allow you to clone your site in just a few clicks. WP Engine and Siteground have excellent and simple staging options, and other hosts like Crocweb offer a tool called Softaculous which will let you spin up a copy of your WordPress site as well.

The advantage of running a staging site on your host is that you can ensure that it has the same configuration as your live site. This will help eliminate some of the possible suspects causing your problem, and can prevent a frustrating scenario where your live site has a problem, but your staging site seems to be perfectly fine.

If your host doesn’t offer staging sites, other options include:

• Use a temporary sandbox site at WP Sandbox, or opt for the paid version to keep your staging site live for a while (use code KIRSTEN20 for a discount)
• Use a paid service such as WP Staging
• Manually create a copy of your website and database in a subdomain like “staging.yourwebsite.com”. You can export your backup from your live site and import it into the copy.
• Run software on your computer such as Local (Windows/Mac) WampServer (Windows), or MAMP (Mac) to test a copy of your website that only exists on your hard drive. Local is specifically for WordPress and will be easier to configure.

Once you’ve tested everything you need to test on your staging site, you can either clone the staging site back to your live site or manually repeat the same changes on your live site that you just made on your staging site. If other people are making changes on your live site, such as editing posts or ordering products, you won’t be able to clone from staging back to the live site without potentially losing their changes. But now you’ll know that you can safely make those changes without breaking your live site, because you’ve done it once already.

If you’d like help setting up a staging site or troubleshooting your WordPress website, just drop me a line with any questions.

(This post contains a few affiliate links. I only promote products and services that I actively use myself.)