Staging Website
What is a staging website? If you are a new developer or curious about the tech world, you must have wondered about this term.
What is a staging website?
A Staging Website is a clone of your existing website. It is made when you plan to make changes to the structure and content of the website or add any new feature. The developers can easily test the changes & fix the bugs/errors before the website goes to the next stage.
An additional benefit of a staging website is that it can be set up locally or online and is easy to create.
Developing a website involves numerous risks. For example, it’s very disappointing to make adjustments to a website only to realize that your live website has crashed. Fortunately for the developers, using a staging website provides a safer environment for web development. It also provides immense scope for innovation and cover for testing everything before putting that on the live website.
To put it more simply, a staging website is a clone of the actual live website. A staging website enables you to test any changes or features that you are planning to implement in your live website, in a secure environment. Developers mostly use staging websites to test changes and fix the existing bugs before going live.
Now, we’ll go through various types of benefits and drawbacks of a staging website. We’ll also state a few methods you can use to set up a staging website of your own.
Benefits of using a staging website:
Enables you to come up with better websites
Provides you with a golden opportunity to detect errors and bugs without putting your live website at risk
Staging websites are usually simple to create
Helps In Website Migration
A staging website can be set up locally or online depending on your preference
Improves Website Performance
However, staging website also has its share of drawbacks that need consideration.
A few drawbacks one must encounter while using a staging website are stated below:
Using staging websites makes your live website take longer to update (as the changes need to be tested again)
A lot of web hosts charge for a staging website service
Staging websites may differ slightly from the live website as caching is not enabled on a staging website.
Who needs a staging website and why?
In an ideal scenario, everyone who runs a website needs a staging website. However, staging websites should be used by someone who runs an operation that demands a testing website because of its vast nature.
However, if your website is lucrative, provides any type of service to its users, or has users that depend on it for a specific reason, creating a staging website is the move you need to make. There are different approaches available for staging websites, depending on your preferences, which are stated below.
How To Create A Staging Website
Set up a staging website through any web host of your choice
Use a staging plug-in to create your website staging sandbox
Set up a staging website through a local installation
Why is a staging website important?
This enables us to test out changes to our website without risking the live website. This allows us to try new themes, plugins, and a lot more with zero to minimal risk.
Other FAQs On Staging Website
Some popular questions that people often ask about staging website
Do I need staging for my website?
With a staging website, you can assure that all changes have been deployed correctly before making it live. It is recommended to have a staging website as it doesn’t affect the end-user on the live website.
What is the difference between sandbox and staging?
A staging website or environment is mainly dedicated to the development team and the sandbox website/environment is designed to allow the developers to try different changes. Basically, the sandbox is for testing out different changes and the staging website is for deploying final changes before making them live.
What is the difference between Dev and Staging?
The Dev environment is where developers do their work. Staging is where developers deploy the changes before production.
How to shift between Dev Environment and Staging Environment?
You can use the Breeze chrome extension which is available on the chrome web store to enable switching between environments.
What is the difference between staging and production?
The staging environment is where developers test if the changes are implemented. And production environment is often the customer-facing environment.