How do I set up a staging for my site?

I stumbled upon an information this was possible on infinityfree to set up a staging for my WP website.

However I do not find the way to do it. Is there a step by step guide or something or someone who’ll kindly guide me?

Thanks!

I not sure what you mean by staging, can you post a link to this information that you stumbled upon so I can see what it is

Thanks

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I think Softaculous has some kind of staging site feature?

I have never used it, and I don’t know if it works on our hosting at all. So of course, I can’t tell you how to use it.

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I believe staging your site means taking your site’s current contents, copying them, and testing what you want to test on the copy. This setup allows you to experiment with modifications—such as updates to themes, plugins, or custom code—without affecting the live site. By testing changes in this isolated environment, you can identify and resolve potential issues before they impact your audience.

To answer @maJulie’s question, there are two ways to clone [stage] your WordPress installation:

Clone with WP staging plug-in

First, log in to your WordPress installation, then navigate to Plugins.

Select the Add New Plugin button.

Search for WP Staging, then install the first plugin [In this image, the one on the left is what you are looking for.

When you are here, select Skip & Start WP Staging

On this screen, locate and select Create Staging Site

For a simple stage, just select Start Cloning. If you are worried that your staged site will take up too much storage, select Check required disk space.

You may be on this screen for a while, this is normal.

Visit the link, enter your Admin credentials, and now you have a cloned site!

Clone using the Softaculous Script Manager

Login to Softaculous, then select Installations.

Select the WordPress logo next to your installation

Locate the Staging button

Either select a URL that you are cloning your website to, or insert a folder name into the blank area. THIS IS IMPORTANT! Press Create Staging after.

Success! Your site’s contents have been cloned to it’s respective URL or folder.

[Note, to access these instructions, press the Arrow]

And Yes, @Admin, the Staging feature works on Free Hosting, it simply copies the WordPress installation and places it it somewhere else defined by the user.

Well, that was a great question!

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There are 2 sources that I found most valuable:
https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/creating-and-using-a-wordpress-staging-site/

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Unlikely to work on free hosting.
If inodes on one WP site is already greater than 30k, the limit of the hosting account would have been exceeded

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Then both tutorials wouldn’t work.

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I would personally create a new free account and make a copy of your site to that account. Running on WP install is already very resource intensive (especially if you have certain plugins and themes installed), running two is most certainly going to get you suspended, which will take your production site down as well.

Generally, I would never recommend you test and run production on the same server (If you do, they better be completely independent, you don’t want your production site to go down while messing around in development). For free hosting, I would say never never never never ever put more than one WP install on an account. WP is pretty good at suspending websites with high load, and adding a staging site effectively doubles that load. When you get suspended, you don’t want your production site to go down as well.

My recommendation is use two accounts, you are allowed to have 3 after all, the only minor inconvenience is that it’s a little harder to setup.

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Using two accounts is definitely an option. However, I think the staging site features let you have a copy of the site, and then have a switch to easily “deploy” the changes from the staging site to the real site. On a separate account, that’s much harder to do.

So in short, there are a few options, but they have some caveats.

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