WP Staging Plugin: a First Look

One of the reasons SiteGround is my go-to web host for shared hosting of WordPress websites is it’s staging sites feature. (Read my article from a few years ago for more reasons.)

However, not every site I work on is hosted on SiteGround or another web host that offers staging.

Therefore I was very happy to discover yesterday — way later than I would have liked — a WordPress staging site plugin that has a lot of promise.

This is a brief first look at the free version of WP STAGING WordPress Backup Plugin – Migration Backup Restore, which I successfully installed and used on a client website hosted on A Small Orange.

My Use Case(s)

The free version of the plugin does not support the one-click deploy feature, which, for my purposes yesterday, wasn’t required. All I needed to do — and I think this is a common use case — was create a staging site so I could track down a plugin conflict and evaluate the viability of replacing the site theme. I was able to do both.

(My other common use case is to develop and test custom code without the risk of crashing the production site — another situation in which I don’t need to press a button to deploy.)

Let me tell you what I like about the plugin.

Postivies, by the Numbers

Positives that can be gleaned from the plugin’s repository page (at this writing):

• 100,000+ active installations
• 2,287 5-star reviews (94% of 2,442 ratings)
• recent (1 month ago) update
• tested up to the current version of WordPress
• prompt support responses

Positives, by the Experience

And here are some positives based on my (admittedly brief) use of the plugin for creating a staging site:

• useful disk-space estimator
  This was crucial. The site did not have enough free disk space initially. By selectively deleting unneeded files using FTP and configuring which files and directories I needed to include in the staging site (you rarely need everything when you’re doing simple testing; see the next bullet point), I was able to create the staging site with room to spare.
• very customizable
  You can create “rules” that determine which files and/or directories to include/exclude from the staging site.
• fast and reliable
  I had to abort my first attempt because one of the MySQL tables (a debug log running on a cron) was adding records too fast for the plugin to keep up. I was refresing phpMyAdmin every 30 seconds, and I watched as the production table added records faster than the cloned table. I was betting that the process would crash when I clicked “Cancel”, but it didn’t. And cleanup was complete. My second (successful) attempt at creating the staging site took under 15 minutes.

My Recommendation

Would I recommend this plugin? As of this writing, that’s a resounding “Yes”. And that’s without using any functions other than staging.