How to Create a Bluehost Staging Site?

Juhil Mendpara

Content Manager

As you might know, Bluehost is perhaps the best web hosting in the commercial market. It certainly is amongst our favorites. And one of the reasons why we consider it top-notch is its inclusion of features like WordPress website staging.

What is website staging?

Basically, a staging site is a copy of the original website ⁠— it uses the same hardware, software, plugins, or anything that’s included in the live site. However, it isn’t a live site. It’s merely an independent copy.

Meaning, if any changes are made to the staging site, the live site will remain unaffected. And that’s the primary reason behind website staging: testing modifications without affecting the live site.

Why website staging?

The main idea is testing modifications. But why? Well, adding new functionalities, updating old plugins, changing UI/UX of the site, or refreshing the whole CMS, in general, can alter/harm your website.

The site can go down or misbehave if the updated version is incompatible or buggy. And it can be a nightmare if you don’t have any backup. Such situations can harm the readership, sales, search engine ranking, and more of your website to keep it short.

With website staging, you can make the same changes on the clone website. If it performs as you wanted it to be, you can upgrade to the same settings on the live site.

How to create a Bluehost staging site?

First of all, there are plugins available for WordPress staging, if your host doesn’t support it. For Bluehost users, there’s a by default staging environment. Here’s how you use it:

Login to your WordPress website.
On the left-hand sidebar, there’s a “staging” option in the menu. Click on it.
Click on “Create staging site”. Once it’s ready, Bluehost will notify you.

Now, you can make all the changes to the site and do quality assurance. If it doesn’t work as it’s supposed to, be assured your live site is intact. If it does, you can make the same adjustments to the live website with few clicks. Here’s how:

Go to the WordPress dashboard.
Click on “Staging”.
There, you’ll have options to deploy files and/or databases. Depending on the update you made, select either or both. In general, choosing both is the best.
Your live site is ready with the new changes without any adverse effects.

That’s it. That’s how to create a Bluehost staging site.

If your web host doesn’t support website staging, you can use a plugin like Blogvault or WP Staging. You can do the same manually as well using FTP and stuff, but that’s a whole other article. For this one, let’s wrap it up.

Final words

Website staging can prevent you from mishaps that occur while updating a website. There are multiple ways to create a staging site. The simplest of all is using the web hosting provider’s environment.

However, many companies don’t offer such functionality at all, or only offers on the premium plans. Luckily for all you Bluehost users, it’s there. And with this article, hopefully, you learned how to take advantage of it.