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.
We consider staging sites to be key to successfully running a food blog.
Testing updates
A staging site is a non-live version of your website that you can use to test updates to plugins, themes, WordPress updates, and third party scripts.
This is important, because you can test installing something on your website that causes it to crash, without taking your live site offline.
Not taking your live site offline is important because it means your users aren't affected, and Google's crawlers don't pick up on potential problems that can cause ranking issues.
How long to use staging sites
A staging site should be used in two ways:
- testing an update, which should take 5-10 minutes
- installing a theme update, which should take MAXIMUM 2 days
The reason you want to keep the use of a staging site short, is because any comments, content updates that happen on your live site are entirely replaced by the staging site when it is pushed live.
Ease of setup
A necessary feature of any host in our opinion is quick and easy way to set up and deploy staging sites. Staging sites should be readily available to test updates in under a minute. If it takes longer than a minute to get a staging site set up, you're wasting your time.
This is why we recommend BigScoots' WordPress optimized hosting, which lets you create a staging site (and deply from staging site to live) in just a few clicks.
A major red flag for hosting companies for us, is when you have to reach out to the hosting company to create a staging site. This indicates that they haven't bothered investing resources into providing customers with a staging environment, which is indicative of a lack of care for customer sites.