Staging

We consider staging sites to be key to successfully running a food blog.

Testing updates

A staging site is a non-live version of your website that you can use to test updates to plugins, themes, WordPress updates, and third party scripts.

This is important, because you can test installing something on your website that causes it to crash, without taking your live site offline.

Not taking your live site offline is important because it means your users aren't affected, and Google's crawlers don't pick up on potential problems that can cause ranking issues.

How long to use staging sites

A staging site should be used in two ways:

• testing an update, which should take 5-10 minutes
• installing a theme update, which should take MAXIMUM 2 days

The reason you want to keep the use of a staging site short, is because any comments, content updates that happen on your live site are entirely replaced by the staging site when it is pushed live.

Ease of setup

A necessary feature of any host in our opinion is quick and easy way to set up and deploy staging sites. Staging sites should be readily available to test updates in under a minute. If it takes longer than a minute to get a staging site set up, you're wasting your time.

This is why we recommend BigScoots' WordPress optimized hosting, which lets you create a staging site (and deply from staging site to live) in just a few clicks.

A major red flag for hosting companies for us, is when you have to reach out to the hosting company to create a staging site. This indicates that they haven't bothered investing resources into providing customers with a staging environment, which is indicative of a lack of care for customer sites.