Creating a staging WordPress site

 

Overview

This article explains how to create a staging WordPress site.

Prerequisites

These instructions assume you've either installed WordPress manually or used the DreamHost WordPress installer. They also assume that your WordPress site is on Shared, VPS, or Dedicated Hosting.

For the rest of this guide, it's assumed your website is example.com, and the staging site is example.dreamhosters.com.

Background

A staging website is a test site you can use to try out changes you'd like to see on your live website. For example, you could test new themes, plugins, and upgrades to see if anything negatively affects your site's functionality. This allows you to work on the staging site while not affecting the live website.

Difference between staging a WordPress or DreamPress site

Don’t have DreamPress yet?

To upgrade your WordPress site to DreamPress, please visit the following article:

DreamPress is DreamHost's managed WordPress hosting. It's a premium service with several extra features over standard WordPress hosting.

DreamPress already includes the ability to stage your website, so the instructions in this article are not necessary. See the following articles to learn more about using staging with DreamPress:

With your standard DreamHost WordPress install, you'll need to manually create the staging site.

Creating a staging WordPress site

Use the following three steps to create a staging website and then move it back to your live site.

 

Create a dreamhosters.com subdomain

To stage a WordPress site, you'll need to manually create a duplicate of it by creating a new dreamhosters.com subdomain. You can name this new dreamhosters.com subdomain anything you like.

It may take a few hours for the DNS to update, but once it does, you should see a Coming Soon page. Follow these instructions to learn how to copy the contents of example.com to example.dreamhosters.com while updating the URLs in the database. This is very important since every WordPress database has hardcoded URLs that need to match your website name.

Install and test

At this point, the example.dreamhosters.com site should be an exact copy of example.com. You can now install and test anything you like.

When the example.dreamhosters.com site is set up exactly how you like, it's time to move the data back to your live website at example.com.

Move the staged site back to the live site

To move your staged site back to your live site, repeat the step you previously took to copy the site. These instructions show you how to import the data back into your live website and change the URLs in the database.

Once complete, your live website is updated with the content from your staging site.

See also

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