What Is A Staging Site?

What Is A Staging Site?

A staging site is a test platform or an experiment ground where one can check their recent updates before making those changes in the live website. Basically you create a substitute site of your main website to test new codes or plugins and naming them as staging site.

Before making any update in your live site, you should always go for a staging site and see whether those changes are required or if they are generating any errors. Most of the times a new code or a plugin creates a lot of errors and system issues which often results in crashing of your website. The correct way of implementing a new change in your website is going through staging sites.

A staging environment can be created by making subdomains and subdirectories of your main site. These subdomains and directories will be reflected as another site where you can copy the data of your live site and use it as a testing ground. And when you are able to generate satisfying results, update the same changes to your live site.

If you don’t use a staging platform for testing and make changes directly. There is a huge risk of you getting infected by some malware or ransomware and end up losing your entire business or website shutdown. Whenever direct changes are made your website becomes unavailable for few minutes according to size of code. So you cannot make frequent changes to your live sites.

And if your customers are hitting your URL and can’t find your site just because you were continuously changing an image which made the website unavailable for more than 20-30 mins or so. Your customer will switch to another site. These things will surely affect your customers and rankings in organic results. If you have recently downloaded a plugin or updated an old one, install and check it in staging site before. Since you are using a staging site you exponentially decrease the risk of damaging your sites.

staging

To create subdomains and subdirectories, go to your cpanel and under the Domains tab you will find an icon labelled as subdomain. When you click on the subdomain icon, a window will appear asking you that subdomain’s name and its document root after filling up those fields, click done. To visit your subdomain, ping its URL on your browser, a blank page will be displayed. Now create a database and FTP account for your subdomain and copy all the files to it.

To copy files and folders from your main site to the staging site. Go to the files tab in your cpanel and browse to the folder where all your themes, plugins are stored. Right click them and click copy, which will display a dialog box asking you the destination. Copy the entire file structure of your live site to the staging environment.  In this way you have created a staging site of your main website.

Conclusion:

WordPress staging is a great tool which not only saves your website from getting collapse but also gives you an insight about how your sites will behave after the updating a plugin or a new code. You are not risking anything while using a staging environment, even you can make it better without losing your data or users.