Running a website means constantly juggling flaming swords: updates, new plugins, and tricky tweaks to elevate and optimize your online presence. But what happens when one of those swords drops?
Catastrophe! Panic! A 404 error page of doom!
That’s where the magic of a staging or test environment comes into play!
A staging environment is a complete clone of your live site, tucked away from the public eye. It’s where you can boldly experiment with updates, new plugins, theme changes, and more without the fear of breaking your live site.
In this article, we’ll guide you through setting up a test environment for your WordPress site. Let’s get to it!
A test environment is crucial for several reasons, all boiling down to one thing: it allows you to make changes and updates without risking the integrity of your live website.
As an open-source platform with a huge development community, WordPress is in a constant state of evolution. These updates, while essential, can be a mixed bag. Sometimes they bring along bugs or may only cause trouble when they interact with a unique aspect of your site.
By loading updates onto your test site first, you give yourself the time to identify and address any issues. It’s like having a dress rehearsal before the big show. This approach also allows WordPress to iron out any problems that might emerge, ensuring that when you do update your live site, it’s smooth sailing.
Redesigning your website can be risky. The last thing you want is to accidentally break your site. Test environments allow you to perfect your redesign in a controlled setting, ensuring you’re ready to wow your audience with a flawless new look.
If your site is facing performance issues, a staging environment offers you a space to tweak settings, enable or disable plugins, and adjust the design elements to see what impacts performance.
However, remember that test sites may not perfectly mirror the performance of live sites. Depending on the root of your performance issues, this may not be a foolproof diagnostic tool, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
With a WordPress test environment, you have a dedicated space to try new things, make mistakes, learn, and grow, all without the fear of impacting your live site.
If you make direct changes to a live website, you risk disrupting or even halting its performance – a scenario that can have far-reaching implications.
Picture a website that’s due for an aesthetic upgrade, which is a common situation for many growing businesses. You directly make edits to the live site, but it misses the mark. You then try to make changes again and again in real-time.
For visitors, this creates a jarring and confusing experience. Frequent changes disturb the user experience and tarnish your brand’s image. No matter how spectacular the final design is, the damage to your audience’s perception may already be done.
This is just one example, and a relatively mild one at that, as it assumes the site continues to function throughout these changes. The real danger lurks when updates go beyond cosmetic tweaks.
Introducing new features, updating plugins, or tinkering with the backend without a staging area can lead to more catastrophic outcomes like a complete site takedown. The damage here extends beyond user inconvenience to potential loss of revenue, search engine rankings, and long-term credibility.
“I used to downplay the importance of a staging site,” says Obatarhe Otughwor, one of Pressable’s Customer Success Engineers, “because I thought it was faster to just edit and update the site directly. But my perspective changed after a performance issue with one of my websites.”
It was a dark and stormy night…well, actually, it started with a regular old speed test.
“I was multitasking, juggling tasks from another site while running diagnostics, when an ‘Optimize JavaScript and CSS’ suggestion appeared.” Obatarhe decided it would be a breeze to update the live site directly.
“And I smiled,” he said, “confident this move would save me time.”
Then it all went sideways.
“After pushing the update, I refreshed the website and was shocked,” says Obatarhe. “The images were distorted; the styling was disorganized. I scrambled to roll back the changes, only to discover the backup, being quite large, would take a long time to restore. In the meantime, I’d have to enable maintenance mode and temporarily deny visitors to the site.”
“That’s when it occurred to me I could have used a staging site as a playground for experimentation. Instead, I spent the next several hours struggling to put the website into its previous working state.”
Once the site was back to its original state, Obatarhe, wiser now, created a staging environment and tried again.
“I was sweating,” he says, “but I was able to apply the update on the staging site, and – after confirming it was working as expected – I finally deployed the changes to the live site. It was a tedious and humbling experience for me, and I’ve resisted the urge to edit a live site ever since.”
You have several options to create a test environment for your WordPress site, but we’ll focus on two of the best methods: creating a subdomain and using a managed hosting service like Pressable (which offers built-in test environments).
There are certain WordPress staging plugins available that can help set up a testing environment, but their methods can vary widely, so we’ll skip this approach for now.
Creating a subdomain is like building a mini-website within your existing domain. This method involves setting up a separate section of your website where you can replicate your live site and experiment away. Here’s a simplified breakdown of the steps:
| define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘stagingsite_db’); // The name of the database for WordPress. define(‘DB_USER’, ‘example_user’); // The MySQL database username. define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘example_password’); // The MySQL database password. |
While setting up a staging site via a subdomain offers control and flexibility, it’s important to weigh its drawbacks before diving in:
Given these considerations, it’s clear that while the subdomain approach has its merits, it may not be suitable for everyone. This is where managed hosting solutions like Pressable offer a more user-friendly alternative.
Recognizing the complexities and challenges of the subdomain method, Pressable offers a simpler, more streamlined solution for creating test environments. As a Pressable user, you don’t need to worry about the technicalities of setting up a subdomain or the risks and costs associated with it.
Pressable’s managed WordPress hosting services take the technical burden off your shoulders so you can focus on what’s important – testing and improving your site.
Pressable offers a host of benefits that make creating WordPress staging sites easy to set up, straightforward, and stress-free:
Here’s how it works step-by-step:
And there you have it – a testing environment for your WordPress website in just a few clicks!
The cherry on top is that staging sites do not count against the site count for your Pressable plan. This means you can create as many staging environments as needed without worrying about additional costs or limits.
You can:
Opting for a managed hosting solution with built-in staging features like those offered by Pressable is a win-win scenario, ensuring your website remains robust, responsive, and ready for whatever changes you need to implement.
After diligently testing and tweaking your site in the staging environment, the next crucial step is to transfer these changes to your live site. This process varies significantly depending on whether you use a subdomain staging site or a managed hosting service like Pressable.
If you’ve set up your staging environment on a subdomain, the process of moving changes to your live site involves manually reproducing these adjustments. This can be meticulous and time-consuming, as it requires:
For users of Pressable, however, this process is significantly easier. Pressable offers a simple data sync option that allows you to automatically push changes from your staging site to your live site. This feature greatly reduces the risk of errors and saves a considerable amount of time and effort.
With just a few clicks, the changes you’ve made in your staging environment can be synchronized with your live site, ensuring that your site remains up-to-date with the latest modifications.
Additionally, Pressable provides a user-friendly tutorial that guides you through the process of syncing your staging site with your live site, making the process accessible even for those with limited technical expertise.
Regardless of the method you use, it’s important to thoroughly test your live site after the updates have been applied. This final step ensures that the reproduction or synchronization process is effective and that your site operates as intended:
When it comes to website management, the ability to safely test and implement changes is extremely valuable. It’s a buffer zone that allows for experimentation, innovation, and refinement without risking the integrity of your live website.
There are various ways to create a staging environment; however, the path of least resistance and the most efficient way to harness the power of a staging site is through a managed hosting service like Pressable.
Pressable makes the creation and management of staging environments straightforward, eliminating the complexity and technical overhead associated with manual setups or using plugins.
You’ll be able to spend less time worrying about the technicalities of your website and more time focusing on what matters most – your content, your design, and your audience.
Whether you’re looking to improve a small business website or managing a portfolio of domains, Pressable has a variety of hosting plans to suit your needs!
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