WordPress Staging Environment for Membership Sites [Guide]

The statement, ‘WordPress Staging Environment saves a lot of bucks and keeps your members retained’, is not at all an exaggeration! When managing a membership site, handling content updates, member registrations, and marketing – you want a smooth, hassle-free experience, right? That’s when a staging site comes to your rescue.

Well, let’s clear the confusion. Do you remember keeping a rough copy and a fair copy in school? Only when you get something right in the rough copy, you jot it down in the fair one. Or the way you try on a new apparel before buying or wearing it on any special occasion. Similarly, a WordPress staging site is your rough copy to experiment and check the new changes. Only when they seem right on the staging website, you make those changes to the live site. Simple, isn’t it?

If you’re not convinced yet, there’s more. This blog is going to take a deep dive into the world of staging environments, its importance for membership sites, benefits, and how to create a staging site environment.

What is a Staging Environment?

WordPress staging site is almost a replica of your live site, but exists in a separate environment. Here, you can test all your membership site changes before applying them on your main site. 

It’s your very own safety net. Here, you can test changes like theme updates, feature release, member registration process, payment integration, and so much more. This helps ensure the smooth functioning of your live site even after changes as they are tried and tested!

Your actual site is live and thriving. Unexpected updates or changes can sometimes cause issues, requiring thorough testing. Without a proper setup, this could mean temporarily taking your site offline, impacting traffic, data, and even member engagement. That’s why a WordPress staging environment is of utmost importance. 

Importance of WordPress Staging Environment for Membership Sites

Your hands are not dusted off after delivering high value content to your members. You must ensure a flawless membership experience. A staging environment for WordPress acts as a lifesaver. Check out why it’s so damn important.

1. Protects Your Members’ Experience

You can’t afford your live site crashing when a member is accessing special content or worse, during new member registration. A staging site allows a safe testing environment without disturbing your actual site’s flow.

2. Safeguards Sensitive Data

Your site holds valuable member data, including payment details and records. Testing directly on your live site poses a risk of data corruption or security issues. Data security is one of the primary reasons to take advantage of a staging environment for your membership site.

3. WordPress Staging Environment Prevents Costly Downtime

If updates don’t go as planned, they could lead to downtime, frustrating members, reducing signups, and affecting trust. A staging site helps identify and fix errors before anything goes live, ensuring a seamless experience.

4. Ensures Plugin Compatibility

Any website uses multiple plugins for smooth setup. To avoid any errors, update plugins, test new features, and addons on a staging site. This gets you ready for what may happen to your actual site post the updates.

5. Smooth Testing of New Features

You can test all your features on a staging site before launching them IRL! Thus, there’s no disappointment or turning back after the actual launch as you know how they work and what to expect.

6. Maintains Your Professional Image

A well-functioning site reflects reliability and professionalism. Preventing recurring errors and downtime helps maintain your brand’s reputation and keeps members confident in your platform. Thus, use a WordPress staging site for a professional and flawless website image.

What to Test on Your Membership Site Using a Staging Website

A WordPress staging environment is not used only for major site updates. You can use it for every minute tweaks that you make to your membership websites. Here’s a list of membership site aspects you can check on a staging website WordPress.

1. Plugin Updates

A staging site helps ensure your plugin is running smoothly without any errors. If you are using multiple plugins, ensure compatibility of each plugin with one another on every update.

2. Payment Gateways and Transactions

With a staging environment, you can actually go through a payment process, refund process, and subscription renewal process. This would help you check if there are any errors while processing various payments.

3. Member Login and Access

A membership site has multiple plans with different levels of content access, right? In a staging environment, you can check whether members of each plan can log in easily. Further, are they able to access content dedicated to their specific plan? You must also verify that the restricted content is not visible to random visitors.

4. Design and Layout Changes

If you are customizing your existing theme or planning to change the theme, don’t do it on your live site. This can affect the frontend appearance of your membership site, impacting user experience. Test the modifications in a dedicated staging environment and check your website for responsiveness across all devices.

5. Content Protection Settings

One of the top benefits of a staging environment is the possibility of verifying content restriction rules. If visibility rules aren’t applied correctly, some content may not display as intended. You must check and ensure the content rules for your membership community as well as exclusive digital downloads.

6. New Features or Add-Ons

New features and addons can be tested for accuracy in a WordPress staging environment. This ensures smooth functioning. Be it the brand new tiered plans, gamification, discount coupons, or even email marketing addons. When you test it using a staging site, they become foolproof to go live! 

7. Using WordPress Staging Environment Core Updates

Testing the WordPress core platform before updates ensures that everything goes perfectly. When you get a green signal for every theme and plugin working perfectly well with the latest updates, you can take the next step with confidence. Furthermore, check your WordPress site speed for the top and fast performing membership site business.

8. Member Experience Flows

Workflow management on a staging site gives you the confidence of a smooth member journey. From basic signup to login, password reset, digital downloads, quick payments, social login, and social community management especially among others. A WordPress staging site also allows you to foolproof the refund and cancellation process.

9. Security Features

On a WordPress staging environment, you can also check the security features. By checking the anti-spam mechanism, reCAPTCHA, login protection, backup, and restore options, you bulletproof your site. Further, also check the permissions and settings using different user roles for a better idea.

10. Email Notifications

If you are using email automation software or ARMember’s inbuilt email notification setup, ensure that the mails are sent perfectly. Welcome messages, payment confirmation, password reset notification, renewal reminders must reach your members rightly and on time. If you are using username and member ID, it must be accurate to avoid confusion.

How to Create a Staging Site for WordPress Membership Websites

Creating a WordPress staging environment is not at all a technical process. Let’s check out the ways in which you can create staging site WordPress.

1. Choose the Right Staging Method

Here are multiple options to create a staging site:

• Hosting Providers: If you are using a managed hosting service like Bluehost or HostGator, you get a single-click staging site as a feature. 
• WordPress Plugins: You can find the best WordPress staging plugin to aid a simple staging site creation. Tools like WP Staging, Duplicator, BlogVault are among the famous names. 
• Manual Setup: Opt for this method only if you have technical expertise. You will have to create a subdomain or a subdirectory of your membership site to manually clone it. 

2. Install and Set Up a WordPress Staging Plugin

Choose a reliable staging plugin like WP Staging or BlogVault. The topmost staging plugins will come with clear instructions to clone your site. Follow it carefully.

3. Sync Your Membership Site Data

Sync all your member data, subscription details, content access rules, payment gateways accurately. Only with accurate data, you can check the further updates.

4. Make Changes and Test Features

Once you’ve cloned your data to the wordpress staging environment, it’s time to test your site and make necessary changes. Test new features, design changes, updates, and membership site flow. Verify whether your updates work well without any disruptions. If yes, then it’s time to go ahead.

6. Push Changes Live

You will have a push to live feature while using a staging plugin. If you are confident regarding all the changes working smoothly, make your changes live. You can even export your staging site manually and import it to the live version.

7. Keep Backups Handy

If you have website backups handy, you can easily do any minor or major changes quickly to your site. This will act as your safety net if by chance something goes wrong while importing your changes to a live site.

Ready to Implement a WordPress Staging Environment?

A WordPress staging site is a crucial tool to manage a membership website with limited errors. It allows you to do everything from testing updates to new features. A staging site helps maintain the member experience and doesn’t disrupt your regular flow.

With a staging environment, you can 

• Keep the member data safe
• Prevent website downtimes and save costs 
• Test plugin and theme updates compatibility 
• Check new features before making it public 
• Update your website with a peace of mind

Setting up a wordpress staging environment is also super simple using a plugin or a hosting provider’s features. With each testing, you make your membership site more and more strong. It is highly advisable to employ a staging site for ease of WordPress website management.

FAQs

What is the staging environment in WordPress?

A staging environment in WordPress is a replica of your live site. It is like a separate place where you can safely test updates, plugins, make changes, or add a new feature without affecting your real WordPress website.

Do you really need a staging environment?

Well, if you own a WordPress website then the staging environment can help you a lot. It is important to secure your system from any kind of crashes, safeguard data, and ensure a smooth user experience before making any changes live.

When to use staging?

The staging environment is used during the time of final and QA testing before the website goes live on the internet.

What is a staging environment used for?

A staging environment is used to preview and test changes before they go live. Moreover, it can also help you to check plugin compatibility, payment gateways, design updates and member access rules. It also protects your live site from errors or downtime by staging an environment to do testing.

What are the main benefits of having a WordPress staging environment?

Here are the main benefits of having a WordPress staging environment which are as follows:

• Protects Your Members Experience
• Protects sensitive member data
• Ensuring plugins and themes compatibility.
• Smooth testing for new features 
• Maintains a professional and error free website