An artist has a rough sketch of their eventual masterwork. An engineer makes a prototype. A writer would have a rough draft of the final text. In the same way, before making your WordPress website live you need to make sure everything works as planned before unleashing your creation to the world. Enter Manage Staging, a powerful tool right in your Mshini account.

Image courtesy of An Phan Van

What is this “Staging” thing you keep going on about?

Staging is the process of making a test website that you can access before making your site live. It has it’s own URL; this means that you are able to test new themes or plugins risk-free, without the risk of losing your existing website.

Why can’t I just use my Live Site and restore a backup if it breaks?

You can, but you really shouldn’t.

• Backups can fail. Our backups are reliable, but the reality is that no backup process is infallible. The backup could be corrupted, or uploading a backup copy can conflict with the new content on your site and would require the time-consuming task of manually going and deleting the offending content.
• You need to test your changes. By using your live site, you are essentially putting the changes out into the world without an idea of the implications of those changes. At best, the changes would break your site. At worst, you may be exposing your clients’ data to anyone who accesses your site.
• Cache. Clients who access your in-progress site may not see the final results if their browsers cache isn’t updated. Every time your browser accesses a site, it caches content to speed up future visits. If you clients have a cached version of your test site, it could mean that they will see placeholder images or content you may not want them to access in the final product. By using a Staging Environment, you avoid this risk completely.

But I need to test everything in the most realistic environment possible!

Your staging site has everything your live site has, including SSL! The only difference is the URL will be https://staging.example.com instead of https://example.com, which will be updated when pushed into production.

So I can use it as a second website?

The staging site isn’t a replacement for a different website for two important reasons

• We don’t do backups of your staging site. If you use it as a second website, it is always at risk that it will be lost if something goes wrong.
• Email is disabled on staging sites to stop potentially buggy sites from sending hundreds of mails.

Okay! You’ve convinced me! Where do I start?

Luckily for you, we have great articles in our Mshini Knowlege Base to get you making use of this powerful tool.

How do I create a Staging Environment? – We take you step-by-step through the process of setting up a Staging Environment, accessing it and then finally pushing it into production when you’re ready.

If you have any questions, give us a shout! We’re always happy to chat.