Creating a Staging Site Using WP Toolkit

Introduction #

If you want to try out something new with your website, it is always best to avoid making these changes on a Live site. Fortunately, our cPanel has a great feature that allows you to create a staging site to test new features. Once you are happy with the features, you can push them over to your live website.

This knowledge base explains creating a Staging Site using WP Toolkit in cPanel.

Login #

• Go to the Hippo Portal by following this link: https://sales.hipposerve.co.uk/
• Login to your Hippo Portal

Go to Hosting Service #

• Access The Hosting Service Where You Wish to Install WordPress

• Choose The Correct Service and click Manage.

Log into cPanel #

• Choose the cPanel login from the Quick Shortcuts Menu.

Go to WP Tool Kit #

• Click on the WP Toolkit Item

• WP Toolkit will load and show a list of your WordPress Installations. If you haven’t used WP Toolkit before, you may need to “Scan” for WordPress installations. This takes a few minutes to complete.

Click on the Clone Option #

• The clone option allows you to build a staging version of your website.

Complete the Clone Website Details #

• Fill out the form with the details of your website
• Existing Domain Mode (Recommended)
• Using this method doesn’t require any changes to your DNS and is set up instantly

• Click Start
• The cloned website will then be created. Please note that this can take some time, especially is your site is large, if you have a number of plugins or a large database. Please be patient whilst the site is build.

The Staging Site #

• The staging site will now appear in your list of installed WordPress instances
• The URL of the website will be https://yourwebsite.co.uk/staging (unless you changed the path in the step above.)
• An SSL certificate will automatically be applied to the new domain, but this may take a few minutes.
• All the login details to access this site will be exactly the same as the live site.

Pushing the Data Live #

• Once you are happy with the changes, you will want to push the data to the live website.
• In the STAGING site choose copy data from WP Toolkit

• You will be asked to select the site you wish to copy the data to. Please note that this can take some time, especially is your site is large, if you have a number of plugins or a large database.

Important #

• The creating of a staging site double the amount of resources that your hosting plan is using. As a result, if you are on one of our smaller plans, you may experience performance issues during the time your staging site is active. Once your staging site is pushed live, and you are happy it’s all working correctly, it should be removed. Staging sites should never be treated as a back up.
• In WP-Toolkit, if you click on the 3 dots on the right of the installation, you can click remove.

• This will completely clean up the staging area and free up the hosting plans resources.
• Web Design Club customers, who typically manage a large number of websites can choose to host their own website on a VPS managed by us. With this, we include a free development server, where users can work on their development sites without worrying about performance issues.