![]() This is why, when we started working on the ManageWP Orion Clone tool, we made sure to focus on reliability and optimization, regardless of the hosting configuration. WP Engine charges $360/year for one WordPress website, although they do have a bunch of cool stuff to justify the cost). Some hosting companies like WP Engine have solved this problem by providing clone tools that work consistently on their web servers, but with a caveat: they work ONLY on their servers, and the benefit usually comes with a higher price tag (e.g. So instead of cloning just these files, your clone tool goes full Rambo and overwrites everything, and possibly crashing your live website in the process because the hosting company terminated the script after 30 seconds. On top of that, there’s a good chance that your favorite clone tool is wasting a huge percent of the resources it takes: let’s say you have a 500MB website, but you only tweaked a couple of files. On the other, good hosting companies focus on performance and don’t take kindly to a script hogging all the site server resources. On one hand, websites keep growing, which means that website servers need to provide more and more resources to clone successfully. Website cloning as we know it is obsolete. There are a number of reasons why the PHP clone scripts fail, but it comes down to one thing: This is because 99% of the cloning solutions on the WordPress market are based on the same PHP cloning method: it’s simple, fast, takes a ton of site server resources and has considerable odds of failing. Something goes wrong, and all of the sudden your live website is giving a 500 error and you’re in panic mode. The fastest way to apply the changes to the live website is to clone the staging website over it, but it’s also the riskiest move. Let’s say you made a bunch of small changes on a staging website. This is a legitimate concern for a lot of WordPress professionals. If you’re using ManageWP, just add the HTTP auth credentials in the Site Options and you’ll be able to manage and clone your website with ManageWP. It’s very easy to set up (they even have password generators now). Preventing access is a more reliable way of stopping crawlers from deciding whether or not to honor your discourage request. ![]() Your live website will no longer show up in the search results.Ī smarter and a more robust way would be to completely password protect your website with HTTP authentication. The problem with this approach is that developers tend to forget to disable the Discourage option, so when you clone a website from staging to live, you also clone this setting. If your main concern is Google, this will be enough. The simple solution is to turn on the Discourage search engines from indexing this site option on the staging website wp-admin dashboard (Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility). So, you’ve got a staging and a live website, but you don’t want staging to be indexed. A 100% reliable staging environment needs to be on the same server as the live website. But here’s the thing: Murphy’s Law guarantees that your website server configuration will differ from your localhost just enough for something to break. Most people avoid this issue by developing websites locally, and there are plenty of tools like DesktopServer that make it easier to build a local website. I learned this the hard way when I was a kid, when my first HTML website did not show up on Google search for weeks because I did final tests on one of my domains that Google crawled. Once you make the same change on the live site, it will be penalized. This could be a big problem when you make publicly visible changes on the staging website. This means that, as far as Google is concerned, your website does not exist. ![]() ![]() Creating a duplicate of your website will cause one of them to be penalized for having duplicate content. Search engines crawl all the publicly listed domains and index the content. This is the most common concern for people who are getting started with web development. We’ll talk about some of these dangers and how to minimize them, so you could make changes to your website, stress-free. So why doesn’t everyone use staging websites? Mostly because we’re lazy and love to cowboy code, but sometimes it’s because we think that the danger offsets the benefit. You can tweak your staging website, perform updates and test new plugins, and not have to worry about crashing your live website. Having a staging version of your website is WordPress maintenance 101. ![]()
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