ARTICLE CONTENT:
What is a Staging Site?
A “Staging Site” is a working copy of your website, that you can use to test plugins, theme changes, and extensive content changes without affecting your main website.
Making a Staging copy of your current WordPress website is a good development practice, and it will save you a lot of frustration if anything goes wrong or you plan to be working on the site for more than a day.
The benefit of a Staging site is that you can do all of your modifications without anyone seeing your changes, and then when you’re ready for the big reveal, you simply go from “Staging to Live” and replace the current site with your updated one.
Prevent duplicate payments
When using a staging site you’ll want to make sure that you are not processing any recurring or subscription payments on your staging site! Processing payments on the staging site results in duplicate payments if not managed properly. Follow these steps to avoid avoid duplicate payments.
Creating site backups
As you create your staging site, it’s recommended that you also create backups of the main site. These will only be used if something goes awry.
Many hosting providers allow you to create site backups.
If you’re using the BackupBuddy WordPress plugin, you can find more detailed information on this process here.
