Setting up a staging site on your server

Agathon offers staging sites to all of our WordPress hosting clients. We encourage clients to use them whenever they’ll be making changes that could potentially impact the user experience (UX).

Setting up a staging site at Agathon is as simple as emailing support and asking us to set one up for you. In the past, we’ve recommended plugins that offer a “one-click staging solution.” Unfortunately, we’ve found that these can sometimes lead to buggy behavior that cause more trouble down the road. Instead, we prefer to create them manually.

Once you’re happy with the results of your tests, you have two options:

1. For smaller, incremental changes—such as new sidebar widgets, font changes, or theme updates—you can make those same changes on your live site.
   
   
2. If your changes are a bit larger and harder to recreate, we can replace your live site with the staging site. As with setting up the staging site, Morgan will handle this process for you. He’ll sync any new posts, pages, or comments, and then set it live, replacing the old site in the process.

After the site has been synced and made live, you’ll want to click around a bit to make sure there are no surprises. And of course, we take nightly backups. We also recommend you run an UpdraftPlus backup for additional redundancy.