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⭐WordPress Staging Plugins
Table of Contents [TOC]
Are your looking for a best staging plugin for WordPress site? We have come up with an updated list of WordPress staging plugins in 2024. Sorted on basis of features, reliability, ease of use, and more. By the end of this article, you will know exactly which local WordPress staging plugin is right for you to make a test site.
NOTE – DO YOU KNOW? These staging plugins are also helpful in case your WordPress site is hacked and you are trying to fix your hacked WordPress site. If this is the reason, then firstly you should run a thorough WordPress malware scanner, then, download the best wordpress staging plugin and start with these Steps to remove malware from WordPress site.
Whenever you are about to make a substantial change to your wordpress website, your first step should be to take a backup of wordpress site manually, clone or create a test site so you can easily restore wordpress backup at later stage.
Whether you’re trying to update your WordPress theme and are worried about losing some customization you’ve made, or want to make sure a plugin won’t crash your website.
A local staging plugin for wordpress will provide you with a safe environment in which you can try things out. Also make sure your site fullfills all these points mentioned in this WordPress security checklist too. These cann be tested easily on your local test site.
⭐Best Staging Plugins For WordPress To Make Test Site
There are several ways to set up a test site, and using a staging wp plugin is one of them. In this article, we are going to show you seven of the best wp staging wordpress plugins.
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BlogVault
There are more than a few scenarios where you might find yourself in need of BlogVault. It is one of the best-known WordPress website back-ups and restore plugins. BlogVault is also useful for site migrations and, of course, gives you access to a staging environment.
BlogVault’s staging feature is great for several reasons. For one, it happens off-site on BlogVault’s servers. It’s easy to set up no matter what hosting service you use, and it offers easy merging with your live website. You can even choose whether you want to merge specific changes or the entire test site.
Staging is a core feature of BlogVault’s product, and you can use it for free as long as you subscribe to BlogVault with prices starting at just over $7 per month.
UpdraftClone
Sticking with the more popular backup plugins that might also offer staging service, we come across UpdraftPlus and its Updraft Clone service.
The main UpdraftPlus plugin is free and offers excellent backup and restore capabilities. This is also a requirement if you want to use Updraft Clone to create a clone of your website.
With Updraft Clone, you can create an exact copy of your website right away, right from UpdraftPlus. The staging website will be temporarily stored in multiple data centers – you can choose the region where your clone site will be hosted.
Updraft uses encryption to protect your data during transmission and storage, and it gives you an easy way to migrate your clone to the live version of the website.
Updraft Clone is a token-based paid service. Creating a clone for 24 hours costs a single token. From there, each additional week of the clone’s lifespan costs an additional token. Tokens start at $15 for a set of five.
WP Staging – Backup, Migrate and Clone
This WordPress backup and restore plugin will help you create a copy of your WordPress site, transfer your blog to another server, or duplicate your site for development.
There are more than a few good reasons why you would want to use a plugin like WP Staging, which allows you to keep all of your valuable data on your server, where you can fully control it.
WP Staging will create a clone of your website and place it in a subfolder of your website. The plugin will create the clone quickly, without causing any server timeouts, to minimize disruption.
Only website administrators will have access to the clone, and it will be kept away from search engines to avoid any potential issues. Eventually, you will have no trouble recognizing that you are working on the staging site and not the live site because the staging site will have an orange admin bar.
The basic functionality of the plugin is free to use. If you opt for the Pro version of the plugin, which starts at $106 for lifetime use on a single website, you’ll get access to additional features.
These include using a custom directory for cloning, making the clone available through a subdomain, multisite support, and streaming and migration.
WP Stagecoach
Many staging plugins are backup plugins that offer staging as an additional service. WP Stagecoach, on the other hand, is a pure staging plugin.
It is designed for the sole purpose of safely creating and modifying copies of your website and then choosing the modifications you want to apply to the live website.
The biggest selling point of this plugin is the fact that it allows you to merge databases. This is ideal if your live website made significant changes to its database while you were working on the transfer site. The world won’t stop shopping at your store while you test out a new plugin, and WP Stagecoach understands that.
As for the rest of the features you get for the starting price of $99 per year, they include exactly what you would need from a staging plugin. It’s easy to use, creates password-protected copies of your website, and lets you import separate files, databases, or both.
WP Time Capsule
One of the main reasons people would consider using the WP Time Capsule is the plugin’s ability to detect and save only changes made to a website. If, however, you want something more than highly targeted real-time backups, you can use WP Time Capsule for its staging and cloning capabilities.
WP Time Capsule lets you create clones of your website at the touch of a button. You can use the clone of your website to test updates, restore previous versions of the website, or any other changes you want to make to it. You can easily copy the changes to your live website or use the clone to migrate the website.
The plugin is available for a 30-day free trial. Once the trial is over, you’ll need to sign up for an annual subscription that starts at $49, or choose to purchase the plugin for $149 for two installs.
WPVivid backup plugin
Another versatile backup plugin, the WPVivid Backup Plugin doubles as a migration assistant and, of course, a staging site builder. With the plugin, you can quickly and easily create a clone of your website which you can then use to test whatever you’re worried about breaking your live website.
The WPVivid Backup plugin is packed with useful staging features. It covers the basics by allowing you to easily create multiple staging websites, as well as push changes to live with a single button.
It expands them with multisite support, selective forwarding options, and the ability to update the staging site using live website data.
You can try all these features for free for two weeks. Subscription for the whole plugin starts at $49 per year.
Duplicator
Duplicator is one of the most popular migration plugins among WordPress users due to its versatility and flexibility. In fact, it has been downloaded by over a million users! In addition to migrating your WordPress site, Duplicator can also back up your site to prevent data loss.
Duplicator is quite easy to use. Above all, it is compatible with practically all hosting on the market. Be aware that if you have internal links, Duplicator automatically changes them when the domain changes.
Once this plugin is installed, you can decide right away whether you want to migrate your website from a localHost or another website. The process is quite fast, it also depends on the size of a website.
It took us about 2 minutes to migrate some of our customers’ sites. There are also hundreds of tutorials on YouTube that show you how to duplicate your site through this plugin.
Another really useful feature is daily backups which can be saved to Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or many other platforms. However, all of this can be done in the Pro version.
Backup Buddy
BackupBuddy is one of the best WordPress backup plugins, which is a premium backup plugin. It automatically backs up the site on a fixed schedule. It not only backs up databases unlike other plugins, but it also backs up everything on WordPress. Hence, it ensures that the user has a copy of all their WordPress website files.
It also allows the user to remotely store backups offsite using BackupBuddy Stash, Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc. It can quickly restore WordPress from a backup. The user also gets a downloadable zip file of their WordPress websites. You can schedule backup weekly, monthly, daily, etc.
Pricing – Blogger-$80/year (1 site), Freelance-$127/year (10 sites), Gold-$199/year (Unlimited site)
BoldGrid
BoldGrid not only provides real-time backup as well as wordpress security services. It backs up not only databases but also all media files, posts, comments, reviews, and site dashboards on the servers.
It also helps secure your wordpress site from malware, wordpress hacking, host crashes, and accidental damage. But users have to open a completely separate dashboard to manage security, stats, backups, and activity.
Total Upkeep prepares a complete backup solution and saves your website from the tragic loss of existing data.
One of the essential WordPress backup plugins that come with 360-degree protection of your website data. Prevent sudden crashes from occurring on any site if you install this backup plugin.
However, you will not be able to control some seizures and it can happen that your website goes completely empty even if you do everything in the right way. In such cases, Total Upkeep fixes everything that makes your site look like before.
Total number of users – 80,000+
Pricing – Premium-$60/year
All-in-one WP Migration
All-in-One WP Migration is a free plugin with premium extensions that focuses entirely on migrating your site to a new server or domain name.
It covers the movement of your database and files, meaning it handles all aspects of migration.
All-in-one WP Migration uses a few nifty tricks to make sure it works on all hosting providers. First, it exports/imports data in 3-second chunks, allowing you to bypass restrictions imposed by your host.
It does something similar with upload sizes, so even if your host limits uploads to a certain maximum, All-in-One WP Migration will still be able to migrate your site.
If you need to change your domain name, All-in-One WP Migration allows you to perform unlimited search/replace operations on your database and will resolve any potential serialization issues to ensure everything goes smoothly.
The free version of the plugin supports mobile sites up to 512MB. If your site is larger, you’ll need to opt for the unlimited version, which removes the size limit.
They also have extensions that can help you migrate your site to cloud storage providers like Dropbox or Google Drive.
Price: Free. The unlimited extension costs $69.
Other extensions vary in price.
Super backup and clone
Super Backup & Clone comes from azzaroco, an Envato Elite author with over 20,000 sales.
Beyond a ton of tools to make backing up your WordPress site easy, Super Backup & Clone also includes a dedicated feature to import any of your backups to a fresh install.
A cool feature is that in addition to offering regular multisite-to-multisite migrations, Super Backup & Clone also allows you to migrate part of a multisite WordPress installation to a single site installation.
You can also go the other way and migrate multiple installations from a single site to a single installation from multiple sites.
While these are certainly niche uses, if you ever need to toss the lines between multi-site and single-site installs, then Super Backup & Clone is for you.
Price: $35
WP Academy Clone
WP Clone is a nifty migration plugin with a strong differentiator:
- You don’t have to worry about your FTP program to handle your migration.
- Instead, all you have to do is create a new WordPress installation in the location where you want to clone your WordPress site.
- Then you just need to install the WP Clone plugin on your new installation and it will take care of the migration for you.
- Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, there is an important caveat:
- The developers fully admit that this process will fail on 10-20% of WordPress installs.
This is the reason why WP Clone is not higher on this list. If you’re willing to give it a shot, WP Clone is one of the easiest ways to migrate your site. Just make sure you have a full back up before you start anything.
Also, if your site is particularly large, you should opt for another migration plugin. Smaller sites (less than 250MB) are more likely to successfully migrate through WP Clone.
All in all, a 10-20% failure rate isn’t huge. But it is absolutely something to keep in mind.
Price: Free
Let’s get it over with!
If you want to play it safe when testing a new WordPress update, crucial plugins, or your WordPress theme, you will always install the update on an intermediate site first, to ensure it can be applied securely on your live website.
You might have other reasons to look for staging plugins for WordPress, but either way, one of these 12 plugins will likely get the job done.
And finally, it’s always worth checking if you really need a staging plugin! Many WordPress hosts offer free migration services. So if all you’re doing is switching hosts, you should definitely check to see if they’ll run it for free.
If you need more help with your site then contact the WP Hacked Help team. It offers a 360-degree scan of your WordPress website with a full analysis of blacklist possibilities and infection signs.
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