322 – Edit Your Site Without Affecting Your Live Site

Announcements WordPress 4.7.2 Security Release Is there a plugin for that? With more than 48,000 plugins in the WordPress repository, it’s hard to find the perfect one. Each week, I will highlight an interesting plugin form the repository. For more great plugins, download my 50 Most Useful Plugins eBook. Popup Builder is the most complete popup plugin. Html, image, shortcode and many other popup types. Manage popup dimensions, effects, themes. Your Website Engineer Update All of my live sites are updated to 4.7 and have SSL certificate Edit Your Site Without Affecting Your Live Site So, you want to make some changes to your WordPress site without anyone else seeing? You have a few options depending on your specific situation. Note: not all of them will work for all types of modifications. Use a theme switching plugin If you just want to change your theme, then using a plugin like Theme Switcha could be the way to go. It allows you to keep one theme active for site visitors, but enables a different one for admin users, so that you can configure the new one behind the scenes. Use a “Coming Soon” style plugin A different approach would be to completely hide your site by adding a splash page or landing page which displays a “coming soon” or “maintenance mode” message. This can be done easily with a plugin like Coming Soon or Launcher or hundreds more in the WordPress repository. Use the staging feature of your Host Some hosts, like Flywheel and Siteground, provide the awesome feature of one-click staging environments. At the click of a button, they copy your website to a special staging URL where you can make your changes. It’s an automated process and much easier than the next option. Often, there will also be an easy way to push the changes you made, back to your live site. Use a subdomain or other testing domain This is very similar to the concept of making a local development version, except that instead of making the copy locally, it will be a live site on the internet so your clients can see what work you are doing. It’s the way we had to do it before hosts offered staging environments. Work Locally My favorite way to work is locally with DesktopServer. It’s much quicker to develop with as you don’t have to wait to upload all of your changes to a server somewhere, plus you don’t have to worry about Google crawling two versions of your site. Thank You! Thank you to those who use my affiliate links. As you know I make a small commission when someone uses my link and I want to say thank you to the following people. For all my recommended resources, go to my Resources Page View on YourWebsiteEngineer.com