How to Set Up a Staging Environment for Your WordPress Website

With a 62.2% market share, WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems in the market. In fact, in 2024, there were 861 million WordPress websites which also included 14.7% of the world’s top websites like NBC, CNN, and NFL.

Considering this, it is important for you to learn to set up a staging environment for the WordPress website. A staging environment is also known as a staging site, pre-live, and pre-production, before the new website or website changes go live.

The main objective of this is to help you ensure that all the new changes deployed from the previous environments are working as expected. In this article, we will take you through the key steps for setting up a staging environment for a WordPress website.

What is a WordPress Staging Site?

A WordPress staging site or environment is the clone of your live website. In this environment, you will be able to experiment and test your website before it goes live so that your live website is not affected negatively.

This means that here you can make significant theme and plugin updates, incompatibilities, code snippets, or any other changes that you are planning to incorporate into your live site.

With a staging environment, all the risk involved in the implementation of these changes gets removed, while also letting you upload them to the live site easily.

Importance of a Staging Environment for a WordPress Website

Setting up a staging environment for a WordPress website is important because:

1. Safety

It is like having a lab on your website, where you can work on it freely without facing any risks or consequences. Additionally, it is also a good way of creating backups of your website as it is a clone of your current live website.

If something happens to your website, your staging environment will let you get back to the latest version of your website without any hassle, thus keeping your users happy and satisfied.

2. Troubleshooting

It is a guarantee that you will have a WordPress error here or there either in the form of a plugin conflict, bugs, or other technical issues. Additionally, there is a high possibility that while solving one issue, other issues will pop up.

This makes the staging environment the perfect place where you can tackle all these issues one by one until they are all resolved keeping your live website performing optimally and giving a positive user experience.

3. Practice

A staging website is where you can change everything about your website without worrying about downtime, negative user experience, and negative SEO results.

Thus, whether you are changing your website entirely, experimenting with new animations or snippets, or adding new elements, you can do it all freely.

4. Improved Workflow and Collaboration

With a staging environment, you will have a more efficient and organised development workflow that can be easily implemented in the live website.

Additionally, it supports collaboration among your team members, letting multiple developers work on different aspects of your website based on their expertise.

In fact, they will be able to do so in a manner that they do not cause interference or disturbance in each other’s work.

6 Steps to Setting Up a Staging Environment for Your WordPress Website

While you can set up a staging environment for a WordPress website either manually or by using WordPress plugins, one of the best ways to do it is through your WordPress hosting provider.

This is because, with a hosting provider you will be able to tap into additional benefits like scalability to help you handle increased traffic and the growth and convenience of one-click staging and deployment.

Create a Staging Site on Crazy Domains

One of the best WordPress hosting providers is Crazy Domains, and the X steps to set up a staging environment for your WordPress website are:

1. Log in to your Account Manager
2. On the menu bar at the top of the page, click on the ‘web hosting’ option.
3. Click on the domain name that you want to manage, which is registered with ‘WordPress Hosting.’
4. Now, on the WordPress Hosting Manager page, go to the ‘domain name’ section of the page and click on the ‘v’ arrow located at the right side of the tab.
5. Click the ‘staging’ tab and then click on the ‘create staging’ button.
6. To go ahead with creating your staging site, click on the ‘confirm and create’ button.

Once your staging environment for the WordPress website is created, you will be notified about the same via email. Usually, this deployment will take a couple of minutes.

After making all the modifications and being satisfied with them, you can make the changes available on your live website by clicking on the ‘transfer to production’ button.

Conclusion

To ensure that your users consistently have a positive experience, your SEO rankings remain unaffected, and you are able to implement all the changes to your website without any downtime or unresolved issues, you should set up a staging environment for the WordPress website.

One of the best ways of doing that is through your hosting provider as this will give you access to additional benefits like one-click staging and deployment and scalability.

Crazy Domains is one of the most reliable WordPress hosting providers because you will get 24/7 technical support, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, DDoS protection, constant site monitoring, pre-installed GIT, SSL certificates, and auto-updates. To know more, contact us today.