How to Create a WordPress Staging Site (Complete Tutorial)

Do you want to create a WordPress staging site? A staging site is a duplicate or replica of your main site. So whenever you have to update, or test plugins and themes, you can do it on your staging site. Once you see everything is working perfectly, you can push the changes to your live site. In this way, your main site will remain safe and secure.

Sometimes, even a single line of bad code might crash your WordPress site. That’s why many WordPress site owners create a staging site for their WordPress website.

It’s super important to have a staging site for a production site with a large number of visitors. That’s why in this post, we’re going to learn how to create a WordPress staging site. This guide will help you create a staging site for your WordPress website. You can create a staging site manually but it will require a lot of work. One of the best ways to create a WordPress staging site is by using a staging plugin.

In this tutorial, we have used a popular WordPress staging plugin to create a staging site. Using this plugin is so simple, you can create your staging site just with a few clicks! Let’s start the tutorial and see it for real.

Why do you need to create a WordPress staging site?

As you might have imagined, there are many reasons why a staging site could be a life saver. Your website is a very important part of your brand. If you have a good number of visitors, then it requires thinking twice before making changes on your site. Again, if an incompatibility issue occurs after an update, it might bring your site down! This will hurt your reputation and people will lose trust.

That’s why it is a good practice to create a staging version of your site. This will help you carry out all the updates, changes, and tests on the staging site while the main website remains safe. Once you see the changes have no bad impact on your staging site, you can push the updates to the live site.

So to summarize, a staging site is important because of the following factors:

• Testing and quality assurance
• Risk mitigation
• Collaboration
• Content updates
• Performance optimization
• SEO testing etc.

That’s why you should create a WordPress staging site. This will help you keep your main site safe and secure.

How to create a WordPress staging site

Now that we know about the importance staging sites, it’s time to create one for your main WordPress website. To create a staging site, we will use a plugin called WPvivid Staging. WPvivid is a popular WordPress plugin for migration, backup, and staging. Whether you want to migrate your site to a new server or simply keep backups of your WordPress site you can count on it. WPvivid also gives us the staging feature that we will use in this post.

We will be using the paid version of the plugin. Yes, WPvivid has a free version that you can use to create a WordPress staging site. But the issue here is that you won’t be able to update the changes. Now this ruins the main purpose of creating a staging site. That’s why you need WPvivid Pro. This will give you access to all the premium features of the plugin including the ability to create and update a WordPress staging site.

So first, you need to purchase WPvivid Pro. Once you purchase the plugin, you have to install and activate the plugin on your WordPress website. We’ll go through the steps of installing WPvivid. 

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Installing and activating WPvivid

When you purchased WPvivid, you had to create an account. This gives you a centralized dashboard where you can access all the important things easily. You can download WPvivid Pro from here and also access your license information. To download WPvivid installer from your WPvivid account dashboard, go to My account > Downloads section. Click on the “WPvivid Installer” to download the plugin. For the installation, we’re following the WPvivid installation document. You can find that from their official web page under the Support section.

The following screenshot has been taken from the documentation.

After the plugin has been downloaded, you can now upload it to your WordPress site through the admin dashboard and install it. So, log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Plugins > Add New Plugin and click the “Upload Plugin” button on top. Now hit “Choose File” and select the WPvivid compressed file that you’ve downloaded. Then click on the “Install Now” button to install the plugin.

After it’s installed and activated, you also need to add in your license key. To get the license key, go back to your WPvivid account dashboard and navigate to My account > License section. Copy the license key and head back to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to WPvivid > License. Paste the license key and click the “Validate” button. Once your license key is validated, we’re ready to go.

Installing the Staging addon

WPvivid gives you a bunch of features through its addons. From your WordPress dashboard, go to WPvivid > Dashboard. Here you can find all the addons WPvivid Pro has to offer. We need the Staging feature, so we installed the Staging addon from this dashboard.

Creating a staging site

Upon installing this addon, it will be added below the WPvivid Plugin option on your WordPress dashboard. Now you can navigate to WPvivid Plugin > Staging sites. Here, you should see two buttons on the Staging Sites tab:

• Create a Staging Site
• Create A Fresh WP Site

We will press the “Create A Staging Site” button. As the label on the button says, this will create a staging site for you.

Staging settings

When you click the “Create A Staging Site” button, it will take you to the Staging settings. Before we start, there are a few things to understand here.

• Directory to install the Staging Site: Here you can choose where you want to install your staging site. We’re selecting wp-content from the 3 options. You can also choose the website root or subdomain. In case you choose the subdomain, you have to add your subdomain address and absolute path. 

• Choose database to install the staging site: Here you can decide if you want to install the staging site to the live site’s database or create a separate database for it. We’re selecting the first option, which will install the staging site’s database with the live site’s one. If you want to create a separate database for the staging site, you have to give it a name, username, password, and host name.

• Choose what to copy to the staging site: Generally the options selected by default is standard one. But you can click on the small arrows to expand the list and choose what you want to include or exclude from this list.

• Database Merging: If you want to set the WordPress staging site as a development site for database merging, you have to install the database merging plugin. Then you can enable this option.

Normally the options selected by default are safe. We only changed the directory to “wp-content” otherwise all the options are the same.

Before you click the “Create Now” button make sure to read the note and tips that are provided at the bottom. It says that you shouldn’t refresh the page while the staging site is being created. It also advises you to temporarily deactivate all cache, firewall and redirect plugins before creating a staging site. 

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Once you’re sure about everything, click the “Create Now” button and a browser alert notification will appear. Click the “OK” button to proceed.

It will take some time, but your WordPress staging site will be created. Now in the “Staging Sites” tab of the WPvivid plugin, you’ll see the details of your staging site. Here you can look at the staging site URL, site admin URL, and other important information.

Below the site info, you’ll find two buttons:

• Update the Staging Site: This button will update the WordPress staging site with the changes that you’ve made on your main site.
• Copy the Staging Site to Live: The staging site will be copied and pushed to the live site. 

That is how you can create a WordPress staging site with WPvivid. With this strategy you can make changes to the main site and apply those changes to the staging site. Of course, that’s not what we usually do. We actually make changes to the staging site and then push the changes to the live site. That’s what we’re going to learn in the next step.

How to make changes to staging site and push it to the live site

Now that we have a staging site, we’re free to make changes and test various plugins, themes, and updates. To do this, find the admin URL from the Staging Sites tab found in WPvivid > Staging Sites section. Use the username and password of the main site to access the admin dashboard of your staging site. Once inside, you should see an orange top bar. This indicates you’re in the staging site.

📌 Please note: If you make any changes to your main site after creating a staging site, you should copy those changes to the staging site as well. Otherwise, when you push the staging site to the main site, the main site’s changes will be lost.

That’s it! Now you can create and maintain your WordPress staging sites with WPvivid. You’re free to make changes and conduct tests on the WordPress staging site, if you’re satisfied with the result, you can push the update to the live site. There are various WordPress staging tools that you can use to create a staging site. In this post, we’ve used WPvivid which is quite good when it comes to creating a staging site.

👉 Get WPvivid Plugin NOW
🔥 Unlimited and Lifetime Plans Available ✅

👉 Video: WordPress staging site tutorial

Conclusion

That’s how you can create a WordPress staging site. Staging sites are very important for websites with a lot of visitors. WordPress professionals always make changes on the staging site first, and then push the changes to the live site. Although WordPress is one of the easiest CMS to work with, sometimes errors can happen. But don’t let that stop you or discourage you. Plugins like WPvivid and other staging tools can help you evade unforeseen disasters. Creating a WordPress staging site is a good practice.

We hope you found this post helpful, and you managed to create a WordPress staging site by yourself. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.