What is WordPress Staging site And Why Do I Need One?

Building and designing a website can be interesting to do. It can be so much fun, it even can become addicting and very time consuming. However, before one gets to the perfect website, several mistakes are likely to happen. When you build a website from scratch, simple mistakes can lead to the crash of your site, cause a delay or malfunction; This might be a huge  and potentially costly problem, especially if you do not recognize where the problem comes from or how to fix it. Avoiding these mistakes on your customer facing site can save your business from losing potential customers.

In most cases, you shouldn’t make changes or updates to your customer facing and live website on WordPress. As you may realize your changes can affect the website negatively. The simple truth is that mistakes will happen, but should your website and users suffer as a result of this? The answer is No! They should not suffer and shouldn’t have to suffer. The best way to solve problems like this is to create a staging environment, a staging site, or hire a WordPress Support Expert.

What is a Staging Site?

A WordPress staging site is an environment where your designs, features, and updates on your WordPress site can be tested. A staging WordPress site is meant to be an exact copy of your customer facing site. On a WordPress staging site, you can make a custom change and test new features without disrupting your users experience. As we know a users experience is key in their conversion. Using a staging site to make your changes can help keep your customers from being frustrated by incomplete features. It is safer because it is an offline version of your website. When you use this, you will realize the mistake before a customer sees it and fix it offline so as not to have issues on your WordPress Site.

Reasons why you need a staging site

Everyone working on a website needs a staging site. You are to realize that no one is a perfect programmer or designer especially with the need to develop responsive features. The staging site has a few benefits, as highlighted below:

• Makes Programming and fixing bugs Easy
• They are simple to create
• It saves your sites by catching bugs and errors in your code before going live.
• They can be used offline and online
• Allows us to create the best websites
• Effectively a back up that can be used to restore your site in case your server goes down or you WordPress Site is hacked.
• Reduces interruption and downtime of your WordPress Website.

It is also nice to note that there are professional WordPress Support and Maintenance companies that can help you to create and maintain your staging  and live WordPress websites like Branching Software, at a reasonable price. These services can help take this off your plate to focus on your business rather than your website. Though if you are want to create your own staging websites there are a few plugins used to create WordPress staging sites that help to ensure the safety of your site. These plugins help to create a replica of your site and help you make a fantastic and functional staging site.

Names of WordPress plugins for staging sites:

There are several WordPress plugins for staging sites. They are online and can be installed at a reasonable price. Some of these plugins have been hand-picked for your convenience.

Blogvault

This is a solution also performs your sites backups. It is one of the most commonly used plugins by WordPress users. Apart from the backup feature, it also creates a staging site. It is easy to use. It even has a seven days free trial, and the subscription is quite affordable. For a single site, the monthly subscription is $7.40 to $20.75. Your need determines how high or low the price will be. This subscription can be used for twenty different sites. It is effortless to use and is easy to understand.

WP Stagecoach

WP Stagecoach is also an incredible plugin. Unlike other plugins, it will not overwrite your database while importing it. On the other hand, it uses a database feature that ensures that the changes made to your live site will not be lost when imported to your staging site. These changes include subscriptions, form submissions, and registrations. One thing is sure: your website is safe. The price for a monthly subscription is a little higher. Its monthly subscription begins at $12 and runs through $45. The number of websites also depends on your plan. You can use it for up to 75 websites. It is also easy to understand.

All-in-one WP Migration

The aforementioned is a unique and trusted plugin. It is used to make website duplicates and also to build these duplicates to the desktop. It is also convenient because you can remove things like spam comments. You can also replace anything you want. It offers a free version for sites that are not more than 512 MB. However paid subscriptions are available for larger websites. You can use it for many sites; It doesn’t have a limitation.

WP Staging

It is a WordPress plugin that creates an exact copy of your site and saves it under a subfolder in your main WordPress installation. Anytime you are working on a staging site, you would be notified and reminded regularly, that you are working on a staging site. The site is free if you want to move from your live site to your staging site. However, you would need a subscription to move it from the staging site to the leading site. You can change your site domain also on it. There is a one-time subscription of $89 to $499. The site is easy to use and trusted by many. You can use it for up to 100 sites. 

Duplicator

Is impressive for staging sites. It is particularly good at backup, cloning, and migration. There is a free version, but it can only accommodate sites lesser than 500 MB. There are subscriptions called the Pro plan. It starts at $59. This plugin is simple to use. It is also regarded to be one of the most popular staging site plugins.

In some cases, if you do not know so much about programming, there is the possibility that you would need a good website developer or Webmaster. Branching Software, A utah development company,  give WordPress support and maintenance at affordable prices. Their Web design is excellent with incredible developers that have the skill you are searching for at a reasonable price.

It is essential to know that as a website owner, you must not take for granted the importance of your site; therefore, you must take good care of it. You should also know that when it comes to programming, website building, or editing, no one is above mistakes. If you are in Utah, Branching Software’s developers are great website developers that can help with staging and building your website at great prices.