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How to Create a WordPress Staging Site in 3 Easy Steps
When you’re ready to change your blog’s theme or if you’re experimenting with coding a plugin like me, you’ll need a staging site.
Staging sites are cloned from your existing site, so you can make all the changes you want and work out any bugs without it affecting your audience. Then, when you’re ready, you can push the site live so the site your audience sees reflects the changes you’ve made.
It also gives you time to make as many mistakes, or do your changes as slowly as you’d like.
It’s very simple to make a staging site in your CPanel if you’re with a quality host that includes staging sites. Most do – with the exception of Bluehost, who charge an additional fee for them.
With Lyrical host, it’s incredibly easy and only takes 3 simple steps to create a WordPress staging site.
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Step 1: Go to Your CPanel
Log into your blog host. In my case, it’s Lyrical.
Navigate to your CPanel. This is usually apparent on your dashboard. In Lyrical, it’s one of the menu items as “LyricalCP”.
This will bring up a library of different options. Today, we need the “Staging” option.
In Lyrical it’s at the top of the screen, but other hosts may have it organized differently. You can hit Cmd + F (Ctrl + F) and search “staging” to find it.
Click on staging – the icon looks like one computer window pointing at another:
Step 2: Clone Live to Staging
If you want to edit an existing site, you’ll need to “Clone live into Staging”.
This means that you’re duplicating all the existing content onto the staging site.
In Lyrical host, if you’ve never made one before this will come up to a screen that says “Create Staging Site” and has some info boxes beneath it.
It looks like this:
If you’ve made one before, this option is on the lefthand side under “Staging”. It has an info box that will show if you do or don’t have a staging site, and a checkbox to confirm that this will overwrite any existing staging site you already have.
It looks like this:
Both have a drop down box in the lefthand corner with two options: Clone live into Staging, and Install Default WordPress.
Select “Clone live into Staging”.
Leave the screen open but feel free to open a new tab as this takes some time – longer the bigger the site is.
Note: You would only install a default WordPress if you are undoing a critical error or switching from a system that may have some extraneous code, like Divi to Kadence Block Editor.
One it says “Success – Your clone is complete!” you’re ready to go play with it and fix things up:
You can either go from the CPanel using the “Visit Staging” button or go to staging.URL.com/wp-admin to log in. It’ll have the same username and password as your main site.
Step 3: Making it Live
Go back to the CPanel Staging area.
On the righthand side, there’s a box that says “Live” and “You haven’t cloned to Live yet.”
Click on the checkbox “I can confirm this will overwrite my existing, live website data.”
And press the button to “Clone into Live”.
This takes a few minutes, then your changes will be served on the front end of your site for your users.
Click through the site to be sure everything moved over properly, run a broken link scan to ensure you didn’t accidentally link to the staging site instead of the live one, and delete the staging site once you’re ready to go.
I recommend taking a backup of your site before you do this just in case anything goes wrong. It’s rare, but always better to be careful. I use the free Updraft plugin.
Watch the Video Demo
Broken Link Warning
A common mistake I see – and have made myself – is adding links in the Staging version of your site.
It’s ok to add links so long as you’re adding them manually. If you use the “search” function in the link area or pull posts/pages for your menu, it’ll automatically make them from the staging.URL.com version of your site.
Since we intend to delete that, those links will become broken links.
It’s ok if you find them and quickly remove them. But when I did my first big theme change, I spent a week hunting them down because I added so many random internal links.
I recommend being careful while you work in the staging site, then delete the staging site, and use brokenlinkchecker.com (it’s free) to find any and all broken links on your site. This will help you find any that linked to the staging domain.
Conclusion
A staging site is a great tool to give you the freedom to change your theme or alter your blog in some way without feeling a time crunch or needing to put up an “under construction” notice on your blog.
This allows you to work during the day, and not at 2 am when you hope the fewest users will be bothered.
I use staging sites as testing grounds whenever I’m playing with code extensively and might break the site, or when I need to switch themes (like when I went from Genesis to Kadence).
This will also save you hundreds of dollars on a developer to change your theme without bothering your audience – their secret is revealed: they just use a staging site.
While you’re doing your change, check if you have any of these plugins that I recommend deleting immediately.
Read More WordPress Blogging Tips
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