How to Create Staging Using Softaculous in cPanel – WordPress Website

By Aslam Saah

The core purpose of staging a website is for website development. A website will be staged (literally a copy of original version) to develop a new website by testing and solving the issue in the staging version and make it live to avoid false practice/bugs on original version. Website Staging environment will avoid such chaos and trouble to the developers. Here, we are about to share the steps for “How to Create Staging Environment Using Softaculous in CPanel” for a WordPress Website.

For A Precautionary Measure, kindly take complete backup of your website using a plugin or backup wizard option in cPanel of your convenient.  

The method, I’m about to process has different way of keeping the backup alive. You will get to know when you’re following the steps below.

Though, I would highly recommend you to keep a separate full backup of your website before starting staging process.  

Steps to Create Staging Environment Using Softaculous in cPanel For WordPress Website:

Here, i have dummy website in the name of asdf.co.uk. In your case, it will be the domain you would like to create staging environment.

1. Login to your cPanel and create 2 sub-domains through your cPanel.
   – Here, I have named them as staging-real.asdf.co.uk and staging.asdf.co.uk.
   – Initially, I will create a staging environment for staging-real and will not use it anymore. This will be my backup file. I will do all the changes only on staging.asdf.co.uk.
   
2. Search for “Softaculous Apps Installer”
   
3. In Softaculous, Select All Installation where you can see the WordPress previously installed for your websites including addon domains and subdomains.
   
4. Click on the “Create Staging” Option for the domain you would like to create staging environment,
   
5. Select the subdomain to which you would like to stage your website.
   – In Choose Protocol keep it similar to your original website.
   – Keep the “In directory” area empty as we don’t need sub-directory like “staging-real.asdf.co.uk/wp”.
   – Click on create staging to process.
   – Since i have created 2 sub-domains, i will be doing this twice.
   – As i have already said, staging-real.asdf.co.uk is my backup of the original verison, i won’t do anything on this sub-domain after this step.
   
   Creating Staging For Another Sub-domain staging.asdf.co.uk
6. After staging each subdomains, you will see a screen with
   

   “Congratulations, the staging was created successfully”.

   Click on “All Installations” and go back to Scripts Installations Section, you will see staging created so far.

   

7. Once all the works/development/changes are completed on staging.asdf.co.uk, you have to click on “Push to Live” option, which you can see to the left of “Create Staging”.
8. It will show,
   

   Current Staging site will be pushed to your live site : “your primary domain” (here it’s asdf.co.uk)

   Click on “Push To Live” to transfer your developed website from subdomain to primary website. In this case, staging.asdf.co.uk to asdf.co.uk
   
   

9. Once the checking and propagation process or completed. You will see a message as,
   

   Congratulations, the site was successfully pushed to live.

10. In my case, once after pushed to live if i would like to revert back to my old design, i will just simply push staging-real.asdf.co.uk to live. So, the old version will be back to live as i haven’t made any changes in staging-real.asdf.co.uk.

If in case you have separate backup, you can revert back using that backup to your old version. Anyway, having a separate full backup of your website before processing everything for staging will be a safer move.

REMEMBER:

• WordPress Login Credentials will be same as your original version for all staging sub-domains.
• If you don’t want the staging sites to be indexed, make sure you have enabled “discourage search engines from indexing this site” in  Settings -> Reading option in your WordPress dashboard.