In a WordPress development and production environment, developers are required to run a variety of tests to ensure quality control before a new feature is released. Pushing new features on a live WordPress website without proper testing is generally not a wise idea, as you can’t predict how they’ll affect the whole site.
There’s always a risk of things breaking behind the scenes, causing you to take down the whole site to figure out what went wrong. To prevent this from happening, development teams often use a staging environment to test new updates and features before they’re made public.
What is a staging environment or a staging site? Read on to find out more.
Create a free WordPress staging environment in seconds with InstaWP.
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
1. A WordPress staging acts as a critical buffer zone where you can test updates, new features, or major changes safely before they go live.
2. Staging environments allow for thorough testing in conditions that closely mimic the live site. It’s an indispensable tool for catching issues that may have been overlooked during the development phase.
3. By enabling detailed pre-launch checks, staging environments contribute significantly to the quality and efficiency of web projects. They allow developers to address bugs and optimize user experiences without the pressure of affecting the live site.
4. WP Staging environments support better resource management and cost savings by reducing the need for post-launch fixes.
So, the big question is: what is a staging environment? Well, let’s discuss it next.
What is a WordPress Staging Environment?
A staging environment is a sandbox testing environment that allows developers to simulate conditions as close to a production environment as possible. In conventional deployment models, the staging or stage environment is often the last step before WordPress websites are launched or software (such as plugins) is released.
Using a staging environment allows companies to test everything before it’s deployed. This helps developers identify bugs or issues that may have fallen through the cracks.
Agencies primarily use WordPress staging environments as a final presentation for clients, showing them their site and conducting final tests before seeking approval. Once approved, they prepare to take the website live.
Think of it as a rehearsal on an actual stage, with just your client in the audience.
Comparing A WordPress Staging Site with Development, QA, and Production Sites
Comparing a WordPress staging site with development, QA (Quality Assurance), and production sites is necessary to understand the web development and deployment process. Here’s a breakdown of their differences and purposes:
| Development Site | It’s where the initial coding and creation of the website happen. |
| QA Site | For thorough testing and review. |
| Staging Site | Complete replica of the live site in a staging environment |
| Production Site | Your live site that the audience visits and uses |
Development Site: It’s a private online environment where developers work on new features, design changes, and bug fixes. Changes are frequent and sometimes unstable as new code is written and tested by the developers themselves.
Quality Assurance (QA) Site: After the development phase, the website is moved to the QA environment for thorough testing and review. Here, the site undergoes detailed testing protocols to identify and fix bugs or issues. Access is restricted to the QA team and sometimes project managers or clients for approvals.
Staging Site: A staging site is an almost exact replica of the production site and serves as the final testing phase before the website goes live. This ensures that any changes will work correctly on the live site.
Production Site: The production site is the live, public-facing website that users visit. It should be stable, fast, and free of bugs, offering a full range of features and content to the end users. It’s where all the development, testing, and staging efforts are ultimately displayed.
In summary, the development site is for building and initial testing, the QA site for detailed testing and bug fixing, the staging site for final checks and client approval, and the production site is the final, live version that users see. Each environment is crucial for the systematic development and deployment of a website.
When Should You Use a WordPress Website Staging Environment?
In an ideal world it would be wonderful to imagine that if each component does its job well on its own, they’ll perform just as well when put together.
Unfortunately, that’s not how things usually pan out. The conditions in which you test different features also play a role. Some may play well with other tools, plugins, or features, while others may cause the site to break.
It’s virtually impossible to anticipate or account for different variables. Testing each part individually in a discrete test environment is one thing, but it’s an entirely different thing when you put them together and start testing them under variable conditions.
Using a staging environment is vital before you release any new feature. It lets you test the website in an environment that is as close to real as possible, helping you identify any issues that you may have missed during earlier testing.
Staging environments can help you identify issues that may arise in production, but might not appear in a dev environment.
Advantages and Challenges of Staging Environments
Staging environments play a crucial role in the web development lifecycle, providing a final checkpoint before a product goes live. While they offer significant benefits, there are also challenges to consider.
| Pros of Staging Environments | Cons of using Staging |
| Mirrors the production environment | Resource-intensive, as it requires additional server space, software licenses, and management. |
| Gives a clear indication of how the changes will perform in the live environment. | Time-consuming |
| Reduces the risk of introducing bugs that could lead to downtime or a poor user experience. | Despite all efforts, the app/site may show unexpected behavior when live. |
| Allows for thorough user acceptance testing by clients or stakeholders | Additional costs |
| No risk related to the stability of the live site | This may cause bottlenecks and delay releases. |
Balancing Advantages and Challenges
The advantages of using staging environments often outweigh the challenges, especially for complex projects and those requiring high reliability. Proper planning, automation, and resource management can mitigate many of the challenges associated with staging environments.
In short, while staging environments require careful management and can introduce additional costs and complexity, they are invaluable for ensuring that new features and updates are thoroughly tested and ready for production, ultimately leading to a better, more reliable end product.
Why Should You Use a WordPress Staging Environment?
As mentioned above, a staging environment is like a dress rehearsal on a real stage. It’s as close to the real thing as possible before you open the doors for your audience and get ready for the performance.
It lets you fine-tune different things and ensure that everything’s working smoothly before the big launch. Here are a few more benefits of staging websites: t:
Reduces Costs
Staging environments are quite beneficial from a fiscal standpoint. It’s always more expensive to fix errors post-launch than during testing.
A staging environment helps you save money, as you won’t have to take down the site or worry about lost revenue while you fix errors.
Enhanced User Experience
By ironing out all bugs and issues pre-launch, you’ll ensure a better overall user experience. A staging environment helps you identify errors that may have been missed during standard test environments, ensuring a more streamlined and improved user experience.
Catch Missed Errors
Creating environments for demos and testing can help dev teams catch errors that may have been missed during earlier testing phases. That’s primarily because most software tests are designed to catch known bugs and issues.
Tests in a staging environment are usually random, which may bring new issues to light that the team didn’t know about.
Improve Production Quality and Efficiency
Using a WordPress staging environment reduces the number of bugs and issues, thus improving the quality of output. It also impacts efficiency, as the team doesn’t have to put out a series of updates to fix issues that may have been identified post-launch.
Use InstaWP to Improve Your WordPress Development Workflow
Learned everything about what is staging? Let’s move a step further now.
Launching a new WordPress site requires you to go through a laundry list of checks. From setting up databases and adding demo content, to configuring plugins and optimizing the theme – there’s just so much that needs attention.
If you want automated staging environments, you should sign up for InstaWP.
InstaWP lets you instantly spin up new sites, and lets you create a portable WordPress staging environment that you can use for testing.
You’ll have full control over your site, and you can easily deploy it on a hosting platform if you want. It has an in-built code editor, a database editor, and offers WP-CLI support for FTP and SSH.
With InstaWP, development teams can launch WordPress sandbox environments with an array of themes and plugins, making it easier to test various scenarios before moving to the production stage.
How To Make A Staging Site With InstaWP
Want to try out InstaWP? Well, the first thing you need to do is get an account with InstaWP. Sign up here.
The next thing you need to do is add the InstaWP Connect plugin to your live WordPress site. Search for it in the Plugins, like this:
Once you’ve activated it, go back to your Plugins menu and press the Create Staging button.
This will appear next:
Just connect your account with InstaWP and you’ll be taken a new menu:
From here, you can choose Staging Type:
- Quick Staging: Creates a staging environment without the media folder for quicker setup.
- Full Staging: Creates an exact copy of your site, including the media folder. The time required depends on the size of your site.
- Custom Staging: Allows you to select specific options that match your requirements.
After selecting the staging type, a dialog will prompt you to customize your staging site.
You can choose active plugins, themes, and whether to skip the media folder, among other options. After that, you have the option to exclude specific files or database tables from your staging site. This step further customizes the staging environment according to your needs.
After finalizing your selections and exclusions, click on the ‘Create Staging’ button.
InstaWP will then generate your staging site from the existing live site, providing you with the staging site URL and login credentials.
This process makes it easy to test changes without affecting your live website. Additionally, InstaWP allows you to clone an existing staging website with the same credentials from your dashboard for even more testing flexibility.
Click here to get a more thorough process.
Staging Environment Vs Test Environments
Why not stick with a test environment? Well, while both staging and test environments are integral to the web development process, they serve different purposes at different stages of the development lifecycle:
Test environments encompass both development and QA environments where individual components and their interactions are tested. These environments are focused on identifying and fixing bugs early in the development process. They are crucial for testing specific functions or sections of the website in isolation or in combination with other components.
A staging environment, on the other hand, is the final testing phase before deployment to the production environment. It is an exact replica of the production site, including the database, configurations, and all other aspects. The staging environment is used for final checks to ensure that all updates, features, and fixes work perfectly in a production-like setting. It’s also used for performance testing, visual regression testing, and client approvals.
In essence, test environments focus on identifying and resolving issues in the early stages of development, while the staging environment serves as the last line of defense to catch any remaining issues and to simulate user experience as closely as possible before the live release.
Staging Vs Sandbox
How about using a sandbox? What’s the difference between sandbox and staging?
Well, a staging environment is a mirror of the production environment, designed to test the website or application in conditions that closely replicate the live, user-facing environment. The main purposes of staging include:
- Pre-Launch Testing: Ensuring that new features, updates, or fixes work as intended in a production-like environment before they are released to the public.
- Final Checks: Conducting final quality assurance checks, including performance testing, security testing, and user acceptance testing (UAT), to ensure that the application meets all requirements and standards.
- Client Review: Providing a platform for stakeholders or clients to review changes and give approvals before the changes go live.
The staging environment is the last step in the development process before deployment to production.
Unlike staging environments, sandbox environments are not meant to replicate the production environment closely. They are more focused on individual exploration, learning, and component-level testing.
While both environments are crucial for the development and release of reliable, high-quality software, their roles within the development lifecycle are distinct:
- Staging environments are used for final testing before release, replicating the production environment as closely as possible to ensure that the application is ready for public use.
- Sandbox environments provide a risk-free area for experimentation, learning, and isolated testing, without the need to mimic the production environment.
Here are some of the main tests conducted in staging.
Build Verification Testing
Build verification testing includes a series of tests that are run to check whether all of the components of the new build work properly, without going too deep into further tests.
Also known as smoke testing, this is just designed to ensure that the core functionality of the website or software wasn’t affected due to the new build.
Chaos Testing
Stress testing or chaos testing involves deliberately including failures to determine the application’s core resiliency. It’s about identifying things that can go awry, and then analyzing how the app responds.
This gives developers the opportunity to mitigate such risks in advance. By anticipating different types of failures and defining redundancies
User Acceptance Testing
User acceptance testing typically occurs just before the move to the production environment. The aim is for developers to test and ensure that the website is capable of real-world tasks, as a user would expect it to.
While user acceptance testing is mostly carried out by developers or engineers, larger organizations often work with members of the target audience, allowing them to test the site and give their feedback.
Performance Testing
Performance testing is also vitally important in WordPress staging environments. Testing the underlying code in a WordPress staging environment before it’s deployed in production helps developers evaluate the stability, scalability, and responsiveness of a website under variable loads.
For instance, performance testing can be used to:
- Determine whether the website meets performance requirements
- Evaluate stability during traffic spikes
- Test the reliability of the infrastructure
- Test various systems and identify one that performs better
WordPress Staging environments can be set up to mimic the conditions of different workloads, making it easy for developers to test how the site may respond in real-world scenarios.
Visual Regression Testing
Changes to the underlying components of a system can affect the overall user experience. In WordPress, visual regression testing is a method that helps you find errors and visual abnormalities. This kind of test is often carried out in staging environments to ensure that a system change doesn’t negatively affect the layout of the site.
FAQs
What is a WordPress staging environment?
A WordPress staging environment is a sandbox testing area where developers can simulate conditions close to a live production environment. It’s used to test new updates and features before they’re made public, helping to identify any potential bugs or issues.
Why is a staging environment important?
Staging environments are crucial for ensuring that new features or updates do not negatively impact the live site. They allow for thorough testing in a controlled environment, which can help prevent costly errors or downtime once the changes are deployed to the production site.
When should you use a WordPress staging environment?
A staging environment should be used before releasing any new feature or update. It’s essential for testing the website in conditions that are as close to real as possible, allowing developers to identify and fix any issues that were missed during earlier testing phases.
How does a staging environment differ from a production environment?
While staging environments aim to replicate production environments closely, there are fundamental differences. Staging environments are used for testing and are not accessible to the public. They allow developers to conduct various tests, such as build verification, chaos testing, user acceptance testing, performance testing, and visual regression testing, without affecting the live site.
What are the benefits of Using a WordPress Staging Environment?
Using a WordPress staging environment can reduce costs by catching errors before launch, enhance user experience by ensuring a bug-free site, and improve production quality and efficiency by reducing the need for post-launch fixes. It also allows for catching errors that may have been overlooked during standard testing.
How can InstaWP improve your WordPress development workflow?
InstaWP offers a platform to instantly create WordPress sites and staging environments, providing tools like an in-built code editor, a database editor, and WP-CLI support for FTP and SSH. This can streamline the development process by allowing for easy testing of various scenarios before moving to the production stage.
Conclusion
Staging environments are like the final dress rehearsal before a show goes live. They’re essential because they help catch any mistakes or problems in a safe space, ensuring everything runs smoothly for the real performance. It’s all about making sure the website or app works perfectly, without any hiccups, when real users start using it.
While setting up and using a staging environment takes extra time and effort, it’s worth it because it helps avoid bigger headaches down the line, like your website crashing or features not working right for your users. It’s all about making a great impression and providing a smooth, bug-free experience for your users right from the start.
And if you want an easy-to-set-up staging environment, sign up for an account today at InstaWP. Get your 1-click staging site now and start enjoying its benefits.
