Overview
This guide explains how to create a staging site in DreamPress.
Background
Staging gives you the freedom and confidence to test changes before you publish without worry. It creates a copy of your site in a "sandbox" environment where you can experiment and preview changes without it affecting what your visitors see. When you're ready, you can push your changes to your live site with a simple click.
Creating a staging site
The following steps show you how to create a staging website and then publish it back to your live site. You can also use these steps to test and use newer versions of PHP.
Before proceeding, ensure that your live site is completely up to date. If a staging website is already in use, ensure that you have published any changes you wish to keep first.
Copy your live site to staging
This option copies your live DreamPress site to a staging website. See the following article for instructions:
After you copy your site to a staging website, you can proceed to step #4 if you're not also testing a newer PHP version.
Change the PHP version of your staging site
This option allows you to select a newer version of PHP and test it on your staging website. See the following article for instructions:
Test your staging site
Once the PHP version on your staging website has changed, log in to your staging website, and examine it to ensure it is working as expected. See the following article for instructions:
Publish your changes from staging to your live DreamPress site
This option copies your staging site and its changes, including the staging site's PHP version, back to your live DreamPress site. See the following article for instructions:
Best practices
Make sure you are aware of the following recommendations when working with a staging site.
Password protecting your staging site
Search engines will penalize your site for duplicate content. To avoid this, your staging site is automatically password-protected so it does not lose SEO ranking. HTTP Auth/Password Protection cannot be disabled.
Copying changes to your live site
Be careful when you copy from your staging site to your live site: you could potentially lose or overwrite any changes you've made on your live site since you started working on the staging site.
If you do choose to copy from the staging site, make sure to back up your live site just to be safe.