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WordPress Staging Sites Explained
Darren H, Senior Copywriter at Krystal, with a passion for writing, music, martial arts, and family adventures.
Darren H

24 May 2021 • 7 min read • WordPress

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Wondering what a WordPress staging site is and why you might want to use one?

A WordPress staging site is essentially just a duplicate copy of your live website. When you create it, it has the exact same theme, all the same content, the same plugins, the same configuration choices, etc. You can log in to the dashboard and manage it just like a “normal” WordPress site.

However, the key difference is that a staging site is private and separate, so your website’s visitors will never see it and any changes that you make will stay private until you’re ready to make them public.

This makes WordPress staging sites a really useful tool to have when you’re making changes to your site (like configuring a new theme) or applying new updates.

In this post, we’ll talk a little bit about the benefits of using a WordPress staging site and the situations in which you should consider using a staging site.

Then, we’ll share some actionable tips on how you can get started with your first staging site, no matter where you’re hosting your WordPress site.

What Are the Benefits of a WordPress Staging Site?
The main benefit of using a WordPress staging site is that it gives you a safe place to make changes and test updates without affecting your website’s visitors or causing problems on your live website.

Your live website is constantly receiving traffic from visitors. So if you’re making changes directly to your live site, you could negatively affect the experience of your site’s visitors if they’re browsing when you make the change (especially if something goes wrong).

For example, it’s not uncommon for plugins to have compatibility issues when you update them. If you use a WordPress staging site, you can check for these compatibility issues before making a change that could affect the version of your site that’s receiving traffic.

This helps you avoid a lot of stress and also makes sure that you don’t cause issues for your visitors.

Once you’ve made the change or verified that an update won’t break things on your staging site, you can manually make the change on your live site. Or, most staging tools also let you “push” your staging site live, which essentially overwrites the live version of your site with the staging version you’ve recently updated.

When Should You Use a WordPress Staging Site?
In general, you should consider using a staging site whenever you make a large change to your WordPress site that has the potential to affect the functioning of your site or the experience of your visitors.

This doesn’t include regular day-to-day actions, such as publishing a blog post or changing a couple of minor settings in a plugin. But it does include things like:

Applying updates to the WordPress core, plugins, or themes – especially major updates that add new features (as opposed to minor updates that fix bugs or security issues).
Installing a new plugin or theme.
Editing your site’s code or adding new code snippets.
Making major changes to the configuration of your site.
Changing your theme or making big adjustments to the design settings in your theme.
There can also be other situations where you should consider using a WordPress staging site depending on your site’s configuration. Basically, if you hear that little voice in the back of your head wondering if that button you’re about to push is going to blow something up, do it on a staging site first!

What Are the Drawbacks of WordPress Staging Sites?
There aren’t any drawbacks to using WordPress staging sites, but you will want to be careful about how you’re using them if you publish a lot of content or if your site receives a lot of activity.

For example, let’s say you create your staging site on Monday. Then, on Tuesday, you publish a blog post on the live version of your site.

Well, that blog post won’t be reflected on the staging site because the staging site is a duplicate of your site as it existed on Monday.

If you were to “push” your WordPress staging site live on Wednesday, that blog post would disappear and your site would go back to how it was on Monday (in addition to all of the changes you made on your staging site).

This isn’t a reason not to use WordPress staging sites – it’s just important to keep in mind when you’re working with them.

To get around this, you can use two tactics:

Simple: Manually make the changes on your live site after testing them on the staging site (instead of “pushing” your staging site to overwrite the live version).
Advanced: Use a tool that allows for “partial” pushes or merging, so that you can push parts of your staging site live instead of completely overwriting the live version. For example, if you’re hosting with Onyx, our staging tool lets you compare the live and staging versions so that you can choose which specific changes to apply.
Methods on How to Create a WordPress Staging Site
At this point, we’ve hopefully convinced you of the usefulness and importance of using a WordPress staging site. Now, let’s get into the practical part and talk about how you can actually create your own.

There are a few different avenues available to create a staging site depending on your hosting provider and knowledge level. In general, the three most common options are to:

Use a built-in staging feature from your host – we offer this on our Onyx managed WordPress hosting plans.
Use a WordPress staging plugin – there are some great plugin solutions, though you’ll usually need to pay.
Manually create a staging site – you can manually move the files yourself and push/pull the database using something like WP Migrate DB
The manual method isn’t an option for most users and if you feel comfortable doing that you probably don’t need a tutorial. For that reason, we’re going to focus on the first two approaches, which are what we recommend for most WordPress users who aren’t developers.

1.Use the Built-In Staging Feature on Our Onyx Plans
If you’re using our Onyx managed WordPress hosting plans, we’ve already created a built-in staging feature that lets you easily start using your WordPress staging sites.