How to Create a Staging Site on Cloudways

Last modified: March 22, 2021

FAQ

Your website is critical to your business and your audience. Whether it’s customers buying products or readers of your content, your site is seen as important. Time down for changes can be annoying for your users and you can lose out.

In addition, changes to your website can cause errors on your website. Even if they’re live immediately. One of the most common issues on WordPress is conflicts between plugins and themes. Errors on your website reflect badly on you. Therefore, you need to spend time offline developing your website. This is best done on a staging site.

A staging site is a site that is live on the internet, is a copy of your website, but allows you to work on it and make changes without affecting the main element. It is a test bed where new apps can be checked to ensure they don’t cause errors on your website.

If there are problems on your site, these can be found and fixed before a customer sees them. Then when you’re happy with the changes, you can push the changes from your staging site to your live website.

Many hosting providers would charge you extra if you wanted a staging website. However, Cloudways offers you a free one-click stating environment for every website that is hosted on your plans. Therefore, you can develop your website in full knowledge that you aren’t giving your customers/users a bad experience. It can also save costs and money in the long term.

However, first, you need to know how to establish a staging environment on your Cloudways server. Here are the steps that you need to take. It is a simple process that is straightforward and can take just a few minutes.

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Step 1: Log In

The first step is to log into your Cloudways account.

Step 2: Application

Now you need to go to the top menu bar and open the ‘Servers’ option. Then choose the name of the target server where your website is. Once open click on the www and then choose your website (known on Cloudways as an application).

Step 3: Create Staging Website

Now you can hover over the grid icon and select the option that reads ‘Clone App/Create Staging’.

A dialog box will appear that will request some further details from you. You can choose which server you would like to have the staging site on. This can be the same or a different one. You should also check the ‘Create as Staging’ to ensure you’re creating a staging website.

Step 4: Complete

Once you’ve entered the information you can click on the ‘Continue’ button. This will start the process for the staging website. It will take some time to clone your website. It will have everything that you have on the website at the time of the request. If you add new blogs, pages or plugins to your live website, these will not be added to the staging website.

However, if you add content or plugins to your staging site, these can be transferred to your live website in an easy process.

Final Word: How to create a staging site on Cloudways

When it comes to creating a staging site on Cloudways, the process is simple and free. It is also useful, allowing you to build a better website without the risk of damaging your current website.

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