Creating A WordPress Staging Environment on Plesk

This post explains how to use Plesk Automated WordPress Toolkit 2.0 that includes automated staging Clone & Sync for WordPress

Has this ever happened to you?

Picture this scenario, you want to make a couple of quick changes on your website so you made some few changes on your local system and it worked well. You then save the changes made and updated the files on the server and then you found out some pages are broken or somethings are not working as it should. You have caused more problems than the quick fix you were meant to make, and worse of all, you are trying to figure out what is causing the error while the live site either broken or down.

This is why you need a staging environment.

A stage or staging environment is an environment for testing that exactly resembles the production environment. In other words, it’s a complete but independent copy of the production environment, including the database.

When setting up your WordPress website, you need a staging environment where you can set up your website, install plugins, configure settings and do whatever you want without the fear of breaking anything, even when you do break anything, it’s not the live site so there is nothing to be scared of.

With WordPress toolkit built into Plesk, creating a staging environment is easy. Let’s get started.

Login to your Plesk control panel.

It will take you to your domains page upon login and if you already have WordPress installed, it should look something similar to this.

Next up, you will want to make a copy of this website, which would become our staging environment to be used for development and testing before taking our changes to the live site. Click on the clone button among the WordPress options.

The clone option creates a new subdomain called staging and would also male a copy of your WordPress database with a new name. Click OK to proceed to clone. When this process is done, you will have a new staging environment called “staging.yourdomain.com”

From here on, you can make all the changes you want. Once you have made the changes and you are ready to go live with them, with the above in place it just takes a few minutes with these simple steps:

Using Plesk’s WordPress sync functionality, you can sync your changes from the staging site to the live site. In the target WordPress instance field, you specify the URL to your live WordPress site. You can select from a couple of sync options: Sync files only, sync database only, or sync everything (files and database).

After selecting an option above, the sync process would start. This process would also first create a restore point for your current live WordPress site so in case anything breaks and you would like to revert, it should be a breeze. When the process is completed, all your changes made on the staging WordPress site should be replicated on the live site.

That’s all. Now you can check your live website to be sure everything looks and works as it should.