Whether you’re fine-tuning your WordPress WooCommerce website’s appearance, testing new features, or simply ensuring everything runs smoothly, using a staging environment is necessary. However, there lie a number of challenges when it comes to preserving the integrity of your WooCommerce site data during the update/migration phase.
What if you could sync staging and live sites? Things would be pretty straightforward, right?
Well, InstaWP is a great tool to use when you wish for the above. It offers a feature called 2-way sync. With this feature, you can sync data from your staging site to your live site without overwriting your live WooCommerce orders and data.
Let’s dive in and explore how to sync data between live and staging sites. But before that, let’s explain what makes staging a must for developing or managing WooCommerce websites.
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Need for Staging your WordPress WooCommerce site
A staging site is a safe and private development environment where you can create, test, and tweak all the exciting elements of your WordPress site without any of the changes affecting what your visitors see.
The staging site is a sandbox where you can identify potential issues and ensure everything works seamlessly before deploying changes to the live site.
Using staging for your eCommerce site is a practice you should embrace, especially for crucial websites like a WooCommerce site where transactional data integrity is paramount. Below are more reasons:
1. Run Tests
Staging lets you try out changes – be it a new theme, layout, or product display – without the fear of anything going wrong on your live site. It’s your testing ground to ensure everything looks perfect and works seamlessly.
2. Bug-Free Shopping Experience
Imagine discovering and fixing bugs before your customers do. Staging lets you squash any pesky bugs or glitches, ensuring your WooCommerce site delivers a flawless shopping experience.
3. Brand Alignment
Testing different themes and layouts becomes a visual feast in the staging environment. You can experiment freely, choosing the perfect look that aligns with your brand without any pressure.
4. Confidently Update Plugins
Updating plugins can sometimes be a wild ride. Staging allows you to update and experiment fearlessly, ensuring your website stays ahead with the latest features without disruptions.
5. Enhanced Performance
Fine-tune your WordPress site’s performance in staging. It will help you optimize your site’s speed, tweak responsiveness, and make sure your store performs at its best before inviting the audience.
6. Better User-friendly Experience
A staging environment like InstaWP is designed with simplicity in mind. You don’t need to be a tech guru to harness the power of a staging environment. It’s your user-friendly toolkit to level up your WordPress site without the stress.
7. Theme Customization
Staging environments provide an effortless way to customize and fine-tune your chosen theme. You can experiment with colors, fonts, and layouts to achieve the desired visual appeal without affecting the live site.
8. Smooth Integration of Payment Gateways
Testing different payment gateways in a staging environment ensures a smooth and error-free transaction process. This guarantees a seamless shopping experience for customers when the changes go live.
9. Multi-Device Compatibility Assurance
Staging environments enable you to check the compatibility of your WooCommerce site across various devices and screen sizes. This ensures a consistent and user-friendly experience for visitors using different devices.
10. Enhanced Security Protocols
Staging allows you to implement and test advanced security measures, ensuring your WooCommerce site is fortified against potential threats. This proactive approach safeguards customer data and builds trust.
11. A/B Testing for Conversion Optimization
Staging allows you to conduct A/B testing on different elements of your WooCommerce site, such as product layouts or call-to-action buttons. This data-driven approach helps optimize conversions before implementing changes on the live site.
12. Seamless Product Catalog Expansion
Testing new products, categories, or variations in a staging environment ensures a seamless expansion of your WooCommerce site’s product catalog. This guarantees a well-organized and user-friendly online store.
How To Setup a Staging with InstaWP?
InstaWP offers users a swift and hassle-free online WordPress WooCommerce sandbox environment for testing, development, and staging purposes. It is a great tool for developers, designers, and anyone seeking to experiment with WordPress without the usual time-consuming setup. To set up one, follow these steps.
Step 1: Create an InstaWP Account
To create an account, go to the InstaWP website. This account will serve as your central hub for managing staging environments.
After creating an account, you can now access all the features in InstaWP that will effortlessly propel your WordPress development projects from conception to execution in record time. These features include:
- Instant site creation
- Inbuilt Code Editor, DB Editor, and Logs viewer
- Edit site code via VS Code (Extension needed)
- Magic login to the WP admin panel
- Seamless migration to any hosting provider that hosts your server
- Bulk theme/plugin installation from WP Repo using slugs
- Save your site as a template (snapshot of the site that can be reused).
- Git integration and GitHub actions support.
- 2-way sync, and so on.
In this tutorial, we will only focus on 2-way sync, considering the scope of this article.
Step 2: Install the InstaWP Connect Plugin
With your InstaWP account ready, you can create a staging of your existing live site using the InstaWP Connect Plugin. This plugin will act as the bridge between your live site and your staging environment.
To kick off the process of installation, log in to your live website and navigate to the “Plugins” section.
Click on “Add New Plugins” and search for “InstaWP.”
Install and activate the InstaWP Connect Plugin for staging.
After activation, click on “Create Staging” to initiate the process.
Click “Connect,” and you’ll be redirected to the login page on InstaWP. Approve the request to connect your live WordPress website with the InstaWP dashboard.
Step 3: Choose Staging Type
After clicking “Create Staging,” users are presented with options to create a quick, custom, or full staging environment. Tailor the WordPress WooCommerce staging site according to your specific needs and preferences with just a few clicks.
The staging site is created and accessible from your InstaWP dashboard. This serves as the WordPress test site, allowing you to experiment, test, and make changes without affecting the live production site.
How to Sync Data Back to the Live Site?
The true power of a staging environment lies in its ability to sync data back to the live site seamlessly.
This synchronization ensures that any successful tests, configurations, or adjustments made in the staging environment can be effectively transferred to the live site. Let us see how InstaWP 2 Way Sync works in this regard
1. The first step to take is to install the InstaWP Connect plugin on the staging site just like you installed it on the live site.
2. In the staging site, navigate to InstaWP Connect in the WordPress dashboard.
3. Toggle the button to “Start Listening for Changes”.
What this does is that whenever you make a change in this staging site, you can sync the changes to reflect on the live site.
Let us see how it works.
Transferring WooCommerce Data from Staging to Live and Live to Staging
To sync your WordPress WooCommerce data from staging to live, go to the staging site and navigate to the WooCommerce plugin in your WordPress dashboard to create or make changes to desired WooCommerce data.
In this instance, let us create a product, product category, and add price.
Navigate to InstaWP in your staging site dashboard.
Sync changes you made.
Without overriding your live WooCommerce site orders and critical data, you can seamlessly sync staging data to the live site in seconds.
To sync back live data to the staging site, find and enable “Sync” with the option to listen to events. This step activates the powerful 2-way sync functionality.
Migrating your Site’s Other Data
1. To sync posts, pages, and Elementor data, go to your staging site dashboard.
2. Create a post or page as per your project’s requirements.
3. Navigate to the top of your dashboard and click on the recording icon. This will open the prompt dialogue of the post or page you created or edited.
4. Click on the “Sync All” button
5. You will see this pop-up page. Click on the “Sync button to initiate the synchronization of the changes you just made in your staging site to the live site.
To sync Elementor edits, install, and activate the Elementor plugin in both the live site and the staging site
Make the necessary edits with Elementor and update your changes. You can use Elementor to make visual and functional changes like edit posts, create post pages, craft layout of an entire website, display dynamic pages and posts, create and edit forms, etc.
6. After updating your changes, navigate to InstaWP in your dashboard to see the changes that are ready for sync to your live site.
You can see the Elementor edits are also included.
How InstaWP help you get the most out of your staging environment?
With the “Sync” enabled, the 2-way sync feature becomes active. This means that changes made in either the staging environment or the production site can be synchronized seamlessly. This bidirectional sync ensures that modifications are reflected in both environments effortlessly.
Seamless Update With Zero Downtime
InstaWP’s 2-way sync for WooCommerce sites ensures that updates, modifications, or changes made in either the staging environment or the live site are seamlessly synchronized. This means you can enhance your WooCommerce website without causing any downtime, providing a smooth and uninterrupted experience for both site administrators and visitors.
Time and Cost Saver
This tool’s functionality not only saves time but also reduces costs associated with potential downtime during updates. The streamlined process allows you to implement changes without disruptions, minimizing the need for emergency fixes and ensuring a cost-effective and reliable WooCommerce site maintenance strategy.
No Missed Transactions or Orders
With InstaWP’s 2-Way Sync, you can update your WooCommerce site without the worry of missing out on crucial transactions or orders. The synchronization process guarantees that every transaction and order made during the updating phase is accurately transferred to the live site, maintaining continuity in your e-commerce operations.
Migrate/Sync your Site, irrespective of the hosting provider
InstaWP is designed to work seamlessly with any hosting company, offering flexibility and compatibility across various hosting environments.
The tool is not tied to a specific hosting infrastructure. Whether your website is hosted on popular providers like RunCloud, SiteGround, or any other hosting company, InstaWP can be seamlessly integrated into your WordPress environment.
Its plugin, InstaWP Connect, facilitates secure communication between your WordPress site and the InstaWP dashboard. This secure connection ensures that your staging environment is created and managed safely, regardless of the hosting provider’s security measures.
Efficient Testing and Experimentation
InstaWP’s 2-way sync empowers you to efficiently test and experiment with new WooCommerce features, themes, or WooCommerce plugin extensions in the staging environment. Any successful configurations or improvements can be seamlessly synced to the live site, allowing you to modify your WooCommerce site without disruptions.
Conclusion
The 2-way sync functionality makes InstaWP a versatile tool for users seeking a seamless and secure WordPress staging experience. You can use its Connect plugin for synchronizing WooCommerce data between staging and live sites. This practice will help you avoid downtime during content updates and prevent WooCommerce order/data losses.
