In WordPress, a Staging Site is a duplicate of a live website. Web developers create a Staging Site as an environment where they can test and experiment on a website before it goes live without affecting the active site.
In the Site, one can fix issues like plugin conflicts or bugs or test changes like themes, add code snippets, or new plugins. All of this activity poses no risk to the live site. Moreover, once you have made changes and updates, you can easily upload them to the live server.
Benefits of a WordPress Staging Site
Regarding website building, you can consider the staging site as a laboratory where a new drug is tested in a controlled environment. The staging site offers a high level of control, whereas the live site environment is like the trial phase – it is less predictable and offers more practical and realistic variables.
The advantages of using a staging site include:
- Troubleshooting: Every site has technical issues that need to be fixed. Sometimes one fix creates many more. Developers can solve these issues in a staging site without affecting the live site and UX. The staging site also enables quality assessment.
- Safety: A staging environment is a safe zone where one can work on a website. Additionally, it is an excellent place to create secure backups of work already completed should something go wrong. Finally, returning to your last version can save extra work hours while keeping users happy.
- Practice: A staging site is an excellent place to conduct experiments. Given that it is not accessible by the public, users won’t see your experiments, encounter issues or downtime. You will also not break your website and render it unusable. You have free range to change the site entirely or try new things like animations.
- SEO assurance: Tweaking settings in a staging site is not visible to Google or other search engines. Therefore it will not negatively impact SEO results.