How to Create a WordPress Staging Site (Manually, Free)
Tutorial Hosting
Hey everyone this is tony sieges tech i’m tony and in this video i’m going to show you how to create a staging site for your wordpress website now you got a lot of different options here as far as plugins are concerned you got blog vault wp stagecoach wp staging
And those all do exactly what they’re supposed to do like they create a staging site for your website as a way where you can make changes without interfering with your production website and that’s great but the thing is those all as far as i know come with a cost some
Type of cost either a one-time fee or an annual fee that you’ll have to pay in order to use that functionality if you want to go that route that is the simplest route the easiest route but if you want something that is free and that you have complete control over
Then that is what this video is all about i’m going to show you how to manually create a wordpress staging site for your wordpress website so that you can make those changes in an environment where it doesn’t interfere with your production website so and i’ll be i’ll be up front here um
Regardless of if you use a plug-in or if you use the method that i’m going to teach you in this video the changes that you make on your staging site will have to be applied again on the production site there’s no easy way to apply the changes once you
Made them on the staging site directly to the production site you’re basically going to have to figure out what you want to change in the staging site and then make those changes again on the production site so with that caveat let’s go ahead and take a look at the
Tutorial here and we are going to be using my wordpress website here at tonyflorida.me to create a staging website so i have um my hosting with dreamhost and again this is this is specific this tutorial is specific for dreamhost but if you understand the general concepts the high level concepts
Of what we’re going to do which is pretty much creating a subdomain and then copying making a copy of our website and then uploading that copy to the subdomain if you understand those three concepts then you should be able to do this with any other hosting provider so
I’ll try to do my best to point out what those high level concepts are throughout the tutorial but some of the individual steps that we go through might be different for you if you don’t have dream host let’s go ahead and take a look at the
Tutorial here what we first want to do is to create a staging subdomain like i said so um in dream host that’s going to be going into our domain section and click on manage domains and then we can create a sub domain for our for our domain name so we’re going to
Click on add hosting to a domain subdomain and in here i’m going to type in something like staging dot tony florida dot me okay and i won’t add the www we’re going to use my existing user name for that and this is going to live at physically on the
Server at home username and then staging.tonyfleeta.me so let’s fully host that domain and while this is working in the background it might take a couple minutes for the dns settings to propagate but while this is working we can go over to our wordpress website and
Like i said take a snapshot of this uh this website as it exists right now make a copy of it and then we’re going to upload that to the staging site so inside the wordpress admin dashboard we can do this all with a plugin called duplicator i have a couple other oh yeah
I have a couple other videos on this channel about duplicator uh but i’ll go through the process again with you you want to click on add new here in your plugins section and then we’ll search for duplicator and the first result here should be up from snap creek
That’s the one that you want so we’ll click on install now and then activate when it’s finished installing so click on activate and then that’ll be now in your plugins list we can come over here to manage and what we’re going to do is create a new package that’s the
Terminology that they use here they call this this archive that we’re going to make a package so default name is fine all the default options are fine click on next and now what it’s doing is it’s in the background scanning our website our database all of our
Images our files our blog posts our pages everything and putting it into an archive so that’s all done everything looks good let’s click on yes continue with the build process and hit build now this will take some time to build a package not too long
But if you have a big website it might take a few minutes but this shouldn’t take more than a minute or so but while that’s doing its thing let’s check to see the status of our staging site so i’m just going to open this up in a new tab
And that’s good this is although the site’s not found because there’s nothing there yet we know that the dns propagation has finished so that’s all ready for us when we’re ready to go back over here we’re still building the package so if this takes more than just a
Couple seconds longer we will pause the video and catch back up with you just so you don’t have to sit here and watch this so we’ll go ahead and do that i’ll see in a couple seconds all right guys we’re back about 20-25 seconds later and our build
Has finished as you can see here there are two files that we have to download and then re-upload to our staging site the first one is the installer file which i’ll download here and then the archive file which is just the a zip file basically so with those two
Files let’s go back into our hosting provider and now uh associated with our subdomain we can access there’s a couple different ways you can do this you can either do this with ftp or secure copy or putty secure copy we’re going to use the built-in ftp web interface here so
What we’re going to do is take those two files and basically upload them to the staging site so we’ll do the small one first the installer.php file that shouldn’t take too long and then when that’s finished you’ll see that’s now on the the hosting of the staging site and then
We can do the same thing with the zip file we just want to upload it we don’t want to unzip it so click on just upload and this will take you know a minute or two maybe so i’ll pause the video again here and catch up with you when it finishes
Okay guys i’m back the installer zip file archive file has finished uploading and now you’ll see that we have those two files under the hosting for staging dot tony florida dot me so because we have this php file installer dot php at the root of our staging file we can access that directly
So we can go over here to our staging.tonyflorida.me tab and just tack on slash installer dot php and that will go ahead and start up the installation process there’s four steps to this so the first step is just make sure everything looks good click on i have read and accept all
Terms and notices hit next and that’s going to extract that archive file that we uploaded um and that’ll take you know a few seconds to do and we can actually see that happening in real time if we refresh this whoops we got knocked off so uh
Forget that well i guess we can come back in and see the status of the files here um but that’s basically extracting everything um as you can see it looks a lot different than what it did when we first uploaded those couple files so let’s wait for this extraction to happen
I’ll pause the video a third time and catch up with you when it finishes okay the extraction has completed let’s go to step two of this process and this is where we’re going to have to set up a database for our new wordpress website so again this depending on if you’re using
Dreamhost or not this step will be slightly different but just in general you have to set up a a database for your wordpress website so for dreamhost let’s go back over here and on the left hand side if you expand more you can go to my sql databases
And what we’re going to do is just create a database so we’ll make a database named um we’ll call it staging underscore tony florida and then we’re going to put it under the host name mysql.tonyflurry.me and then the user can be tony florida dot me um and then actually let’s make a new
User because i’m not sure what the password is for that so we’ll create a new user we’ll just call it tflo or ida me staging staging that’s fine and then the password i’ll just do i’ll suggest a strong password um and copy that onto my clipboard so let’s create that database
And that’s going to take you know a couple seconds to create um and now we can go ahead and use this information to input it into the installer so let me i think the best way to do this is to just kind of make this half screen
And then make this half screen so we can just go back and forth and copy and paste so the first thing because i do have the password on the clipboard i’ll paste that in here um we want the host to be the host name so for me that’s my
Dot tony flurry that dot me the database name is staging tony florida and then the username is tony t florida me stagin okay so um let’s test that connection to make sure we’re all hooked up properly and we are good to go we got a pass and a good here so let’s
Continue with the installation here this is just saying that everything in the database is going to be overwritten that’s okay because it’s a fresh database install click on ok and let’s just make this full screen get out of here and now step 3 pick the information for your wordpress website we’re just going
To call it tony florida staging and it’s going to be existing at this url and on this physical location on the server so that looks good click next and then we’re good to go so we can go ahead and log into the admin site with this button here and
Uh let me see if this credentials these credentials work and it does these are the same credentials for your old uh your production wordpress website so use the same credentials for staging as it is for production um and now we are logged into staging.tonyflorida.me so we can look at this website
Whoops it’s not quite ready to go yet or maybe it was just a cache copy it is ready to go so um staging.tonyflorida.me we have that we’re done with duplicator so we can get into that and then we also have tonyflorida.me the production website so
What i can do now is in the staging website go into the wordpress admin dashboard and make changes and these changes will not affect the production website so let’s let’s do something extreme like we’ll change the theme we’ll change the theme from the current theme to 2017. so we’ll activate that
Um let’s just see what that does did to our website so this is vastly different than what we’re seeing uh on staging so we see this big picture header and then and then our static content here and that’s not affecting our production website at all so if i’m satisfied with these changes on
The whatever i do if i change the theme or add new plugins or even do updates if when i’m satisfied with those changes i can reapply those changes manually on the production website and like i said there is no good way to you know automatically pull or push
Those changes to the production website it’s just something that you have to you know use it as a sandbox to play around with whatever changes you’re going to make and then redo those changes on your production site so guys that’s about it the high level concepts of how to create a
Staging website for wordpress if you have any questions let me know in the comments below i’ll do my best to help you out check out some of my other wordpress videos here please subscribe to this channel for more videos like this and if you do i’ll see you in the next one You
Learn how to manually create a WordPress staging site so you have an environment to test changes before migrating to production. In this tutorial, we will place the staging site on a subdomain and use the Duplicator plugin to clone WordPress. Any changes tested in the staging area must be manually reapplied to the live site when ready. For more information, visit https://tonyteaches.tech. Check out my vlog channel @TonyFlorida #wordpress #staging
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