How to Test WordPress Themes Online Before Going Live[Free Testing Method]

What empowers a WordPress website? Well, we have many things to list. But, today, our focus will remain on the WordPress theme as the right theme can make the website look outstanding and bring the right kind of widgets to the right place. 

Themes may have glitches/anomalies that can ruin the entire vibe of your otherwise functional WordPress website. So, you can’t use any random theme and try it out on your live website.

If this is what you have faced, then this post is a steal deal for you as we’re going to tell you about a secret method of testing WordPress themes online without causing any harm to the live site. Everything related to ‘how to test different WordPress themes online without messing with the live theme’ will be answered right here. 

Why Testing a Theme Online Before Going Live Matters

Launching a new WordPress theme without testing is like driving blindfolded—you might get lucky, but chances are, things will crash. Here’s why you absolutely must test a WordPress theme online before making it live:

• Avoid Website Meltdowns: Prevent your visitors from experiencing downtime or unexpected errors.
• Protect Your SEO Gains: Keep your hard-earned Google rankings safe from sudden drops due to theme issues.
• Guarantee Lightning-Fast Load Times: Ensure your site stays fast, responsive, and user-friendly on all devices.
• Dodge Plugin Nightmares: Catch compatibility issues between themes and plugins early to avoid broken functionality.
• Customize Without Fear: Safely experiment with styles, widgets, and layouts without risking your live content.

Testing themes online isn’t just good practice—it’s essential to keeping your website professional, user-friendly, and glitch-free.

What If I Forget to Test a Theme Online?

Skipping your theme testing can feel like playing with fire. Imagine launching a website only to find broken layouts, sluggish performance, and frustrated visitors. Here’s what might happen if you skip the crucial step of testing a WordPress theme online:

• Unexpected Downtime: Your site might crash or display errors, leaving your visitors in the dark.
• SEO Setbacks: Hidden bugs could harm your search rankings, making it harder for new users to find you.
• User Experience Nightmares: A poorly tested theme can result in clunky navigation and visual glitches that turn users away.
• Data Disasters: Unintended conflicts with plugins or custom code might lead to data loss or corruption.
• Last-Minute Scrambles: Fixing issues on a live site can be stressful, time-consuming, and expensive.

In short, forgetting to test your theme online is like launching a ship without a safety check—you risk steering straight into troubled waters. Stay ahead of the game by always giving your theme the trial run it deserves!

Challenges with Testing a Theme on a Live WordPress Site

While testing a WordPress theme online before going live is what every expert recommends, the process is not simple. In fact, it’s filled with many challenges, such as: 

#1 – Ensuring that the user experience is not impacted 

Experienced WordPress Developers often recommend testing your sites without affecting the live site to mitigate these issues.

No matter how impressive a theme sounds on paper, it can create creates troubles when used on your live website. It’s because some of its features may not be compatible with other website components.

This impacts the user experience, directly affecting navigation, page loading times, and overall site performance.

Test your sites without affecting the live site.

#2 – Keeping the downtime as little as possible 

Installing and activating a new theme is not something that you can finish off in a blink of an eye. It needs time, and if you’re trying out the new theme on a live site, you have to deal with downtime or errors. 

If the theme is incompatible with your existing plugins or has conflicts with other elements of your site, it may cause disruptions, rendering your website inaccessible or displaying errors to visitors.

#3 – Controlling data loss 

Imagine a scenario; you test the new theme on a live site, and it messes up with it and results in severe data loss. Does it sound crazy? Yes, it does. 

If the theme modifies or rearranges your site’s content or settings, it can lead to unintended consequences, such as loss of customizations, broken links, or data inconsistencies. 

#4 – Ensuring to retain SEO ranking of the live site 

When all these disruptions are happening, the SEO ranking of the live site is more likely to go down, and this is something no one will want. 

How to Test Different WordPress Themes Online: Best Methods Explained

Alright, WordPress lovers! Time to crack the code: Online theme testing – let’s master it! Sure, there are other ways, but forget the rest. We’re zeroing in on the ultimate theme tester method that truly delivers.

But, before that, let’s learn about the basics.

• To test risk-free and keep the live site safety first, create a staging site.
• Always take the site back up, no exceptions!
• Check theme compatibility with the installed plugins, as plugin harmony = smooth sailing.
• Use a performance scanner to test the theme for speed.
• Mobile-Ready is key because mobile audience matters most.
• Conduct SEP audit before or after the new theme installation.

Once you have these prerequisites handy, let’s get started to test a theme online with the best theme tester. Yes, we will recommend the best to our reader and this time, it’s the staging site feature of InstaWP. It’s a total game changer for WordPress developers working on the custom theme on a daily basis as it enables them to:

• Spin Up Staging Sites in SECONDS: (No more waiting! Launch test sites faster than you can say “WordPress theme”!)
• Customize EVERYTHING: PHP, WordPress Versions, & More: (Total control under the hood! Tweak server settings and WP versions to match your exact theme needs.)
• Pre-load Power: Themes & Plugins Ready to Roll: (Skip setup drudgery! Pre-install your go-to themes & plugins for instant testing.)
• Code & Database Access – Dev Tools Unleashed: (Dive deep! Code Editor & DB Editor at your fingertips for granular theme customization.)
• Checkpoint Magic: Save Your Progress Instantly: (No more lost work! Revert to saved states and experiment fearlessly.)
• Team Up, Theme Dream Team Assemble!: (Collaborate seamlessly! Invite team members, link Git repos, and build together.)
• Migrate Anywhere: Launch Your Masterpiece with 1-Click: (From staging to live in a snap! Deploy your perfected theme to any host.)

In a nutshell, InstaWP staging sites are the best theme tester that any developer can use to make the entire process

Impressed with the capabilities of InstaWP staging site as theme tester? So, don’t hold yourself and give it a try right now. Here is how.

Connect your live site with InstaWP with the help of the InstaWP Connect plugin. Here is how.

Once connected, you have to create a staging site of your live site. This guide explains the process in detail.

Fun Fact: InstaWP staging sites are 100% customizable. You can create a staging site from scratch, using your pre-built templates, using AI, or with the help of the premium templates.

For the sake of this guide, we’re testing the Kadence theme.

Go to Appearance > Theme and add Kadence theme on staging site. The theme for testing online is now ready.

Let’s say we want to check the colors and fonts available in the theme. I will go to Customizer and I will systematically customize the colors and fonts as per my requirements.

There are tons of options available for customization. Next, let’s test the patterns available in Kadence.

Using the block editor, I would systematically insert each available Kadence pattern onto this page, carefully documenting the pattern’s name and category. This allows for a comprehensive visual inventory of all patterns. pattern onto this page, carefully documenting the pattern’s name and category. This allows for a comprehensive visual inventory of all patterns.

Furthermore, I would thoroughly test any customization options available for each pattern, such as color adjustments, spacing, and alignment. This ensures that these options function correctly and consistently. Finally, I would visually inspect each pattern for consistency with the theme’s overall design, ensuring that color palettes, typography, and spacing are harmonious. Any issues or inconsistencies found during this process would be documented and reported, allowing for necessary adjustments before deploying any changes to the live site.

Like that, we will check every aspect of the theme that matters in the staging site. Based upon your requirements, you can test the theme online without breaking anything on the live site.

Once you’re satisfied that the tested theme is worth a try, push your changes to the live site. And, InstaWP makes the job super easy.

Seeing the ease, we have no qualms to say that staging sites of InstaWP are indeed the best WordPress theme tester online theme tester.

But, it’s certainly the only way for pre-installation theme testing. You have two other ways as well.  

Theme Previews: The Initial Sanity Check

For a theme tester, a preview is the first, rapid-fire sanity check. It’s about quickly assessing the theme’s core design elements and feature set. Think of it as a visual scan for obvious red flags. Does the layout make sense? Are the typography choices readable? Do the promised features seem to be present? I

t’s a “surface-level” inspection, great for weeding out clearly unsuitable themes. However, a seasoned tester knows a preview is just a marketing snapshot. It won’t reveal the underlying code quality, the theme’s performance under load, or its compatibility with the vast ecosystem of WordPress plugins. It’s a preliminary filter, not a definitive test.

Local Development: The Controlled Experiment

Local development, on the other hand, is the theme tester’s laboratory. It’s where they can conduct controlled experiments, replicating real-world scenarios without risking damage to a live site. Setting up a local environment is an investment, requiring technical proficiency, but it provides the power to isolate and analyze every aspect of the theme. The tester can:

• Simulate diverse content: Test how the theme handles various content types, image sizes, and data volumes.
• Debug code: Dive into the theme’s code, inspect HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and identify potential issues.
• Test plugin compatibility: Install and test the theme with a wide range of plugins, uncovering conflicts and performance bottlenecks.
• Performance profiling: Measure the theme’s loading speed and resource usage under different conditions.
• Accessibility testing: Use development tools to ensure the theme meets accessibility standards.

For a theme tester, local development is about rigorous analysis and meticulous attention to detail. It’s about uncovering the hidden flaws and ensuring the theme delivers a robust and reliable user experience. It’s the difference between a glance and a thorough examination under a microscope.

“Previews? Local setups? Cute. 😉

But for real theme testing power, it’s InstaWP staging sites, period! 🚀

We’re talking instant, real-deal WordPress environments, seamless collabs, and zero server headaches.

Feature ⚡	Theme Previews 👁️	Local Dev 💻	InstaWP Staging ☁️
Setup Speed	Fast	🐌 Slow	Instant 💨
Realism	Limited	High (Setup!)	💯 Mirror Live
Plugin Tests	Meh	Thorough	Easy & 🧪 Thorough
Collab 🤝	🚫 Nope	😬 Tricky	🎉 Real-Time
Tech Needed 🤓	Low	High	Low/Med
Resource Hog 🐷	Low	🤯 High	☁️ Minimal
Debugging 🐞	Limited	🕵️‍♀️ Thorough	🔍 Easy & Deep
Git Integration 📂	N/A	Maybe	✅ Easy

Benefits of Testing WordPress Themes using InstaWP

Using a staging site to test WordPress themes and building it with InstaWP brings a lot to the table as:

• It doesn’t force you to get into the mess of account hosting for the staging website. The tool takes care of hosting and other related tasks. 
  
• It allows you to bring all your staging sites together to the platform with a single login. So, you can test the themes on all your WordPress websites from a single platform.  
  
• InstaWP empowers you so much that you can keep a check on all the changes a theme is doing to the live site and track the impact of these changes in real-time. This way, you have a chance to decide whether the picked theme is workable or not. 

• You can even fill demo content, e.g. pages, posts, products, authors, and tags, using the Faker functionality to understand the theme’s UI better.
  
• It is so easy to use that you don’t have to be an expert or a tech whiz. Everything is pre-made and simple clicks are enough to have a functional staging site ready. 

• InstaWP Connect plugin is the right tool to own when you need a simple and viable theme testing approach. Using the plugin, developers can easily have a fully-functional staging website ready to help you.

And, if you have multiple sites to manage, InstaWP’s site management feature makes things extra sorted. You can test themes on 100+ sites without logging into individual sites, streamlining your workflow from chaos to calm.

Imagine: one dashboard, a hundred sites, and the power to deploy and test themes with a single click. No more tab overload, no more login fatigue.

InstaWP lets you push theme updates, run compatibility tests, and maintain consistency across your entire network, all from a centralized hub. It’s like having a supercharged control center for your WordPress empire, ensuring every site shines, effortlessly.

Theme Testing Done! What’s Next?

Once you have successfully tested a theme before going live, don’t think that the job is done. Now, it’s time to transition from the controlled environment of staging to the dynamic reality of your live site. Here’s what developers should do next:

1. Backup, Backup, Backup: Before anything else, create a comprehensive backup of your entire live site. This includes your database, files, and any custom configurations. This safeguard allows for a swift rollback if any unforeseen issues arise during deployment.

2. Deployment Strategy: Choose your deployment method wisely. Whether you’re using a staging-to-production push, Git deployment, or manual file transfer, ensure a smooth and controlled transition. Minimize downtime by deploying during off-peak hours.

3. Clear Caches & CDNs: After deployment, clear all caches, including WordPress cache plugins, server-side caches, and CDN caches. This ensures that visitors see the latest version of your site and not outdated cached content.

4. Thorough Post-Deployment Checks: Don’t assume everything is perfect. Manually test critical functionalities on the live site. Verify:

• Page Loading: Check that pages load quickly and correctly.
• Navigation: Ensure menus and links function as expected.
• Forms & Functionality: Test contact forms, e-commerce features, and any other interactive elements.
• Responsiveness: Confirm the theme looks and works well on different devices.
• Plugin Integration: Verify that all plugins are working harmoniously with the new theme.

5. Performance Monitoring: Use performance scanner to track your site’s performance after deployment. Monitor loading times, bounce rates, and user behavior to identify any potential issues.

6. Error Log Review: Regularly review your server’s error logs and WordPress debug logs for any errors or warnings. Address any issues promptly to maintain site stability.

7. User Feedback & Iteration: Encourage users to provide feedback on the new theme. Monitor social media and support channels for comments and suggestions. Use this feedback to identify areas for improvement and iterate on the theme.

8. Ongoing Maintenance: Theme deployment is not a “set it and forget it” task. Schedule regular theme and plugin updates to ensure security and compatibility. Perform periodic testing to maintain optimal performance.

9. Version Control & Documentation: Commit all theme changes to your version control system (Git) and update your documentation. This ensures that you have a clear record of changes and can easily revert to previous versions if needed.

By following these steps, developers can ensure a smooth and successful transition from theme testing to live deployment, minimizing disruptions and maximizing the benefits of the new theme.

What to Keep in Mind While Testing WordPress Themes Online

Testing WordPress themes online, especially in a staging environment like InstaWP, offers immense flexibility, but it’s crucial to keep a few key factors in mind to ensure thorough and accurate results.

Firstly, mirror your live site’s configuration as closely as possible. This means replicating the plugins, content, and settings to create a realistic testing environment. Discrepancies can lead to misleading results.

Secondly, prioritize responsiveness testing across multiple devices and screen sizes. A theme might look fantastic on a desktop but break on a mobile device. Use browser developer tools and real devices to verify consistent performance.

Thirdly, pay close attention to plugin compatibility. Themes can interact unpredictably with plugins, so test thoroughly with your essential plugin stack.

Fourthly, don’t neglect performance testing. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to assess loading times and identify optimization opportunities.

Fifthly, ensure accessibility. Check for proper heading structures, image alt text, and keyboard navigation to provide an inclusive user experience.

Lastly, document your findings meticulously. Keep track of issues, take screenshots, and provide clear feedback to developers. This structured approach will help you identify and resolve potential problems before deploying the theme to your live site, ensuring a smooth and successful transition.

Conclusion

The right kind of WordPress theme can make or break a WordPress theme. This is why developers have to test a theme before implementing it on the live website directly. However, the process is extensive and can cause a serious performance issue on a live website if the theme is messed-up with the live website. 

Use our suggestion in this blog post to test your preferred themes before settling down on the best option. Say goodbye to all the development hassles in theme finalization and own a compatible theme with pride by using InstaWP.