CyberPanel is a control panel that allows you to easily setup commonly used configurations for your web hosting plan. This post describes the procedure of using CyberPanel to staging your WordPress site.
Quik Launch offers staging as one very important feature to its customers. Staging refers to the procedure of cloning your live site to a subdomain so that you can use it for development. This is generally considered the better approach if your development involves risks that may break your site.
When do you perform a WordPress staging?
Staging a WordPress site clones an exact copy of your site to a subdomain. This is commonly used when you want to modify your site drastically. One example is to change your site’s theme. Although changing the theme is easily done with just a few clicks, when you site is large and complex, the layouts of different components may differ from your expectations. You probably would not want your visitors to see your site looking disorganised. Staging your site clones your live site to a different URL so that you can conduct all the testings on the staging site without affecting your live site. Once your staging site is finalised, you can then sync your staging site back to your live site.
It is also helpful to understand that creating new contents such as posts and pages should not require you to stage your site. Such content could be saved as draft and will not be viewable until you publish them. Even when you want to modify the contents of an existing page, you could save the changes as drafts. They are not viewable until you update the changes.
Procedures to staging a live WordPress site with CyberPanel
The overview of staging a site is:
- Stage your live site.
- Work on the staging site.
- Sync the staging site back to the live site.
CyberPanel offers a very convenient feature to staging your WordPress site.
- Click Websites > List Website > Manage to access your website’s control panel.
- Click Databases. Observe that you have only one database. It is useful to note down your current live database name. After staging, you will have two databases. When you want to re-staging a second time, you will need to delete the previous staging database. You would not want to delete your live database wrongly.
- Go back to your website’s control panel.
- Click the Clone/Staging button on the upper right. For Quik Launch account users, prepend
stagingbefore your domain name e.g.staging.classroomt.net.stagingis used because this subdomain need to be resolved in the DNS records and for Quik Launch users, this is the default settings. - Click Start Cloning to start the process.
Once it completes, you can access your staging site at staging.classroomt.net.
What are some differences between a staging site and the live site
Since a staging site is used for development purposes, some plugins such as LSCache are not cloned. However, you could install the plugin manually if you find your staging site is having problems.
Some software licenses may not be transferable to subdomains. For example, Elementor Pro, the page builder plugin that Quik Launch uses for site development, is not transferable to subdomains. If you are using Elementor Pro, consider purchasing a Plus license that allow you to connect up to 3 sites.
Another important plugin that is not transferred is Google Site Kit. Although the plugin is synced across, the settings are not. You may not want to set this up since Site Kit is used to track visitors in your live site. It is important to remember to set up the configurations after syncing your staging site back to the master site.
Syncing the WordPress staging site to the live WordPress master site
For the example here, I changed the content and also the theme of the staging site. After finalising the staging site, you will need to sync it back to the master version.
To sync back the staging site to the master site, you will need to access the staging site’s control panel.
- Go back to your website’s control panel and click List Domains.
- On your staging site’s list, launch your staging site’s control panel by clicking on the CyberPanel icon.
- Click Copy/Sync to Master.
- Next, check all three boxes to completely sync the database and files to the master site.
- Click Start Syncing.
After the syncing completes successfully, you can check that your live site is now the same as your staging site. Remember to reinstall the LSCache plugin and update any licenses involved.
When you need to do WordPress site staging again
To repeat staging your live site is similar to what you have accomplished earlier. However, there are some important steps that you will need to prepare before staging.
Firstly, a Quik Launch plan only allow 2 databases. These correspond to the live database and the staging database. To stage you live site again, you will need to delete the old staging database. You need to put extra care not to delete the live database. It will be handy to retrieve the earlier note that you recorded on the live database name. However, if you did not record it, the lower database(WrQxzbdEocYpn3) is the staging database. Make sure you delete this database correctly. Future staging database would also show up as the lower database.
Second, you need to delete the subdomain’s folder.
- On the control panel, click Databases > Delete Database.
- Select the previous staging database and click Delete Database.
- Go to the live site’s control panel.
- Click List Domains.
- Delete the staging site’s directory.
Once you have done the above two steps, you could proceed with staging as described above.
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