All updates should be done on a staging site, not your live site. Using a staging site allows you to safely test updates, plugins, and design changes without affecting your live site.
Most hosting providers can create a staging site for you by cloning your current site. If you’re not sure how, simply reach out to your host and ask them to set one up. This is usually quick and ensures everything is configured correctly.
Our Recommendation: For the smoothest experience, we recommend managed WordPress hosting like BigScoots, which allows you to create a staging site in just a few clicks:
Important
Pushing staging to live will overwrite your live site. For sites that are actively publishing content, avoid making changes on your live site while working on staging.
When you push staging to live, it completely replaces your live site, it does not merge changes. This means anything added to your live site after creating the staging site (like new posts or edits) will be lost.
If you need to keep publishing, you’ll either need to pause updates temporarily or plan to manually recreate any new content on your live site after pushing staging.