Do you like risks? Because if you create major changes to your WordPress site without testing them – aka editing your site when it’s live – that’s exactly what you’re doing. Without a WordPress staging plugin, you’re essentially stepping into blind each time you tweak your site. There are many WordPress plugins available to help you that you don’t know yet.
Don’t do that! during this post, You’ll learn about top 5 WordPress staging plugins that will help you create and manage staging sites easily.
WP Staging – WordPress staging plugin allows you to create an exact copy of your entire website for staging or development purposes in seconds.
(Exact time depends on the size of your website)
It creates a clone of your website into a subfolder of your main WordPress installation including an entire copy of your database.
PLUGIN FEATURES:
- No SASS service. All data belongs to you and stays on your server.
- Easy to use! Just install it and click on “CREATE NEW STAGING SITE”.
- No server timeouts on huge websites or/and small hosting servers
- Staging website will be available from example.com/staging-site
- Very fast – Migration process takes only a few seconds or minutes, depending on the website’s size and server I/O power.
- Only administrators can access the staging website. Login with the same credentials you use on your production site.
- SEO friendly: The staging website is unavailable to search engines due to a custom login prompt and no-index header.
- The admin bar on the staging website will be orange colored and shows clearly that you work on the staging site.
- All database tables will be duplicated and get a new prefix beginning with wpstg(int)_.
- As default the staging website will be copied into a subfolder.
- Extensive logging features
- Supports all main web servers including Apache, Nginx, and Microsoft IIS
- [Premium]: Choose a separate database and select a custom directory for cloning
- [Premium]: Make the staging website available from a subdomain like dev.example.com
- [Premium]: Push & migrate plugins and themes to production website.
- [Premium]: Define user roles that should receive access to the staging site only. For instance, clients or external developers.
- [Premium]: Migration and cloning of WordPress multisites
- New: Compatible with WordFence & All In One WP Security & Firewall
Difficulty Level: Easy
Pricing: (One Time)
- Free
- Personal $97 (1 site)
- Pro $152 (5 sites)
- Developer $261 (30 sites)
- Agency $544 (100 sites)
Duplicator is the most powerful migrator / WordPress staging plugin available.
PLUGIN FEATURES:
- Move, migrate or clone a WordPress site between domains or hosts with zero downtime
- Pull down a live site to localhost for development
- Transfer a WordPress site from one host to another
- Manually backup a WordPress site or parts of a site
- Duplicate a live site to a staging area or vice versa
- Bundle up an entire WordPress site for easy reuse or distribution
- Perform a full WordPress migration without struggling with messy import/export sql scripts
- Pro version includes a lot more features
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Pricing: (One Time)
- Free
- Personal $59 (3 sites)
- Freelancer $79 (15 sites)
- Business $129 (Unlimited sites)
- Gold $359 (+ Lifetime updates and support)
WPvivid Backup Plugin is the only free all-in-one backup, restore and migration WordPress plugin.
Migrate a copy of WP site to a new host (a new domain), schedule backups, send backups to leading remote storage. All in one backup & migration plugin.
Many of us didn’t know that WPvivid Backup plugin also works as a WordPress staging plugin.
PLUGIN FEATURES:
- Customize everything to backup
- Create staging sites and push staging to live site
- Incremental backups
- Auto backup WordPress core, themes, and plugins
- WordPress Multisite backup
- Advanced remote storage
- Advanced backup schedules
- Restore backups from remote storage
- Migrate everything via remote storage
- Edit user roles capabilities
Difficulty Level: Easy
Pricing: (One Time)
- Free
- Basic $99 (3 sites)
- Freelancer $199 (100 sites)
- Business $299 (Unlimited sites)
The only migration tool you will ever need as a professional WordPress developer.
WP Synchro was created to be the migration plugin for developers, with a need to do customized migrations.
You need it done in a fast and easy way, that can be re-run very quickly without any further manual steps.
You can fully customize which database tables you want to move and in PRO version, which files/dirs you want to migrate.
A classic task that WP Synchro handles, is keeping a local development site synchronised with a production site or a staging site in sync with a production site.
You can also push data from your staging or local development environment to your production site.
WP Synchro is getting popular as a staging plugin.
PLUGIN FEATURES:
- Pull/push database from one site to another site
- Search/replace in database data (supports serialized data)
- Handles migration of database table prefixes between sites
- Select the specific database tables you want to move or just move all
- Automatic clear cache after migration for popular cache plugins
- High security – No other sites and servers are involved and all data is encrypted on transfer
- Setup once – Run multiple times – Perfect for development/staging/production environments
PRO PLUGIN FEATURES:
- File synchronization (such as media, plugins, themes or custom files/dirs)
- Only synchronize the difference in files, making it super fast
- Customize the exact synchronization you need – Down to a single file
- Support for basic authentication (.htaccess username/password)
- Notification email on success or failure to a list of emails
- Database backup before migration
- WP CLI command to schedule synchronizations via cron or other trigger
- Pretty much the ultimate tool for doing WordPress migrations
- 14 day trial is waiting for you to get started at WPSynchro.com
Difficulty Level: Easy
Pricing: (Monthly)
- Free
- Personal $8 (2 sites)
- Starter $10 (5 sites)
- Small $13 (10 sites)
- Medium $20 (30 sites)
- Large $48 (100 sites)
The Most Reliable Incremental Backup Plugin with Free Cloud Storage. Best Part, Comes with a FREE Staging Environment.
It is the perfect solution for developer and agencies as it comes with all the tools you need to maintain and manage multiple websites. From One-Click Staging to Flawless Migrations to Complete Website Management and a White Label Solution. It even provides out of the box Client Reporting.
PLUGIN FEATURES:
- Incremental backups that never overloads your server
- Free offsite storage ensures 24X7 availability
- 90 days archive to recover from any mistake
- First plugin with Multi-site backup support
- 1 million+ website restores with 100% success rate
- Differential Restore for lightning-fast recovery
- 90 days archive to recover from any mistake
- Perform full Restore even if your website is offline
- Safely test your website updates and changes
- Staging site runs on our cloud servers
- Completely free of cost
- One-click Merge to push changes to live site
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Pricing: (Monthly)
- Free
- Personal $7.4 (1 site)
- Small $16.58 (5 sites)
- Developer $49 (20 sites)
- Agency (Have to contact them)