If our site receives so much traffic that an hour or two of downtime would jeopardize it, we really need to invest in hosting companies. This is where we need to be honest with ourselves, because if our website is also our livelihood, then hosting is not one of those places where we want to cut corners, or scrimp and save. When we crunch the numbers, we need to aim for maximum income while keeping our overhead low. But we also need to consider the revenue that we’ll need to achieve in order to cover our costs, and whether our choice will help or harm our business goals. This is something that we must decide for ourselves, based on the size of our site, and the volume of traffic. Then again, you may prefer SiteGround because of their superior quality of service. These include hosts such as Bluehost, SiteGround, Kinsta and even FlyWheel’s premium hosting package includes this option, and of course we’ll be posting links to all of these and more in the show notes below.īlueHost is the more popular, because they offer their staging service for free. There are plenty of WordPress Web Hosting services that also offer staging services, whereby a completely independent environment is created on the hosting server, for us to run all of our tests, and try out new ideas. Once our live site is backed up, the second method, the safest and easiest way to push our site is through our website’s hosting service. To do this, you can use the Duplicator plugin, or Migrate DB, even All-in-One WP Migration. Remember that it’s always better safe than sorry. That said, it is extremely important to back up your Live site and data before you do anything else, regardless of whatever way you choose to push your site. As such we felt that we would risk readers misunderstanding the tedious steps and accidentally steamrolling their live site. One method is a complex procedure that involves messing around with individual files and folders through an FTP or SFTP interface, using tools such as C-Panel. When it comes to our other category of WordPress and Elementor users, those who rely on data that comes from an external source, there are two ways of pushing updated site from the staging environment to the live site without risking the loss of any data.Īs aforementioned, our main concern with data that comes in the form of users subscriptions, purchase orders, even comments etc., is that they will have continued to register on our live website, while we were busy working on the isolated staging version. The reason we need to make this distinction is that we need to know whether or not we should be concerned about data that was added to our live website, - while we’re working on the backup-version of our site, - in the isolated staging environment. This includes data such as information from forms or orders placed by users, as well as uploaded files, images, comments, etc. User Generated Content – Websites that rely, completely or to a certain degree, on user data.Also known as Moderator Generated Content, or Brand Content. Owner Generated Content – Websites that rely solely on the content that we, the site moderators, provide.Pushing our staged site, taking our updated website with all it’s changes and tweaks, and placing it in place of our live (or production) site is just as important, if not more so.įor the purpose of staging, we need to establish two types of WordPress websites or if you like two groups of Elementor users, each defined by the type of content used on the site: In our previous Monday Masterclass we saw how simple it was to set up a staging site, but that’s only part of the staging process. Staging is imperative to the upkeep and maintenance of website, removing the risks of testing new plugins, updates, trying out graphic and animated content, things that could harm, crash, and potential kick our site offline.