How to stage your website – .com – Wingdings Translator Online

In this tutorial we will see how to stage your website, to heal in health in the event that you have to make changes or updates.

What is staging?

There are many ways to define “staging”, but to make it easy, we will say that it is about the staging procedure. make a clone of your site (that is, all identical) that will be in another “stage” or stage of our website.

What does that mean? That this clone will be a web twin at a different URL than ours, which nobody knows about. Instead of being in the production stage, it will be in a development stage.

This is different from doing a traditional backup. For that, better take a look at the .

So… Why do I want a clone of my website hidden in an unknown URL? Well, staging sites are used for many things, but there are mainly two basic reasons:

Copy of security from the current website
website to do tests without risking

In short, we could say that staging is “The experiments, with soda“. Do you want to update an important plugin? Do you want to install something new? Do you want to delete certain data?

It may be that everything goes well, but if something goes wrong, what do you do? With staging we can recover a copy, or avoid the error from the first moment. The most frequent and normal is the second option, but depending on the flow you follow, you can use it for one thing or another.

What flow does a staging follow?

It depends on your level of risk, there are 3 options:

risky
1. You do staging.
2. you make the changes on your website.
  1. If everything went well, that’s it.
  2. If something has gone wrong, you restore the copy staging security.
cautious
1. You do staging.
2. you make the changes on staging.
  1. If everything went well, you also make the changes on your website.
  2. If something has gone wrong, you don’t make the changes.
super cautious
1. You do staging.
2. you make the changes on staging.
  1. If everything has gone well, you pass the website from tests to production.
  2. If something has gone wrong, don’t do it.

How to staging?

There are hundreds of ways to stage. There are even plugins for it. But I recommend always doing it at the server level. In other words, it should be a service offered by your hosting company.

Here I am going to tell you how he does it SiteGround, because it is very simple and intuitive, and it is also a highly recommended hosting. But maybe your hosting company also offers it. So ask them!

The first thing we need to do is go to SiteGround’s cPanel and click on the staging banner, which looks like this:

Then we can choose the website for which we want to do the staging. In this case, we choose the only one that is available:

Notice that we can choose between “Create test copy” and “Manage test copies”. That’s because we can do as many as we want. In this case we will choose the first option.

Then they will ask us if we want to password protect that staging. This is to prevent someone from seeing that test website, or even from being indexed by Google, or considered duplicate content. Although it is optional, it is recommended to do it this way, to avoid problems.

We give you to continue… And that’s it! We already have it created in a subdomain called “staging1”, fully operational. And the next thing we will see will be all the information on our website in staging:

As you can see, it has been sewing and singing. With just 3 clicks, we already have our test copy created. We can visit it, and we will see that everything works perfectly, and that all the internal links have changed correctly:

As you can see, the website is identical, with the only difference that we have it in the “staging1” subdomain. Let’s see now what options we can do with this staging.

Staging options

As we have said before, what we do from now on depends on our objectives. Let’s review the options that the control panel gives us:

Launch and Activate: This will transform our “web staging” into our production website, that is, the real one. We will only use it after we have made the changes and make sure that everything is working perfectly.
destroy test: This, which seems illegal in a trial, refers to the fact that this copy will be removed from the web, and we will not be able to use it anymore. It is usually used when we have already launched it in a real environment, and we will no longer need it.
Replicate: This option is to “clone this clone”. As “meta” as it sounds, it is. We would create a new website in the “staging2” subdomain that would be a copy of the copy.
Password protection: This is used to modify the previous setting, in case we want to remove the protection or change the password.
Admin panel: Direct access to the WordPress control panel of the staging website.
Create Git repo: Create a Git repository of this web copy. This is already for advanced developers working with SG-Git tools.

So, as we have commented previously, we now have several options, the most normal being this sequence:

We make the changes in the staging: We update WordPress, plugins, themes, we add, we remove, we go crazy. Everything that is needed.
We check everything: And I mean EVERYTHING. Pages, entries, links, procedural flows, conversions… And if you have an eCommerce, above all, do a purchase simulation to see that everything works well. It would not be the first time that failures have been discovered in the payment gateway 3 days after having no sales.
We launch and activate: This will make the web we have in “staging1” automatically become the web in production (the real one, come on).

Launch staging to production

The operation is very simple. We just have to hit the green “Launch and activate” button, and we will see two options:

As well indicated in the image, the easy release COMPLETELY replaces the current web, that is, all the changes that we have made both in the files and in the databases.

On the other hand, the advanced release it will allow us to choose which files and which database tables we are going to replace.

For example, in this staging I have removed a plugin called “Google Analytics” and have updated the contact information of several users. That has repercussions on both the files and the database. Let’s look at it as it tells us:

As you can see, an entire directory has been deleted (the one with the removed plugin)the “usermeta” table has been modified (with user information) and the “options” table (because the plugin has been disabled).

Once we have chosen the launch we want, we click “Launch and activate” and that’s it, we will have our staging “in production”:

As you can see, working with staging is a much safer way to update our websites, especially if we have an eCommerce or a , which we don’t want to stop working at any time.

Summary and conclusion

A staging site allows us to create a copy (clone) from our website to test it. Once we verify that everything works correctly, it can be “transferred” back to our real website.

Staging can be achieved in many ways, but the most effective ones are done at the server level, since they are faster and we won’t have timeout problems. So, ask your hosting company if they offer it.

If you want to know more and better about this type of good practice, take a look at the more than 6044 videos in the online marketing section, especially the intermediate WordPress course and the WordPress Security course.