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WordPress

Katarzyna Walsh
Katarzyna Walsh
24,409 Points
Posted by Katarzyna Walsh
Katarzyna Walsh
24,409 Points

Staging area for WordPress sites

Hello, is a staging area needed for WordPress sites for small businesses? If so, what approach do you recommend?

1 Answer

Luke Pettway
Luke Pettway
16,593 Points
Luke Pettway
Luke Pettway
16,593 Points

I would dare to say that staging is a must for a modern development workflow, but really it is up to you whether you want a staging environment or not. Some people work locally and just push their code once they are done, but I think there is merit to testing on a subdomain install to ensure that nothing server side would be misconfigured and break. This also gives you a way for your client to review things before they "go live".

Typically what I do is the following:

  1. Local Server using AMPPS or VVV (just use what works for you).
  2. Staging server setup as dev.clientsite.com
  3. Production server setup as clientsite.com

I use Beanstalk http://beanstalkapp.com/ to version control my code, and upon doing a commit, it is automatically deployed to the staging server. Once that is approved, I use Beanstalk to manually deploy the code using a special commit tag or by going into dashboard and deploying that way.

You could also opt to use WordMove https://github.com/welaika/wordmove or DesktopServer https://serverpress.com/get-desktopserver/ to deploy the code as well, which will save you a lot of time. Take a look and see what others are using and put together the tools that help you achieve your goals the best.