Creating a development environment by mirroring your website to a subdomain

Why you need a WordPress staging site ?

The primary purpose of a staging site is to verify that all updates from earlier environments function correctly before being released to the live website. This is why it’s never a good idea to make major changes directly on your live site.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to create a development, or staging, version of your existing website. We’ll set this up on a development subdomain to manage this part of the process.

Please follow these steps to create new subdomain:

1. You will need to Create a subdomain that will need to use to for development version of a website. We’ll use dev.domain.com
2. login to “cPanel >> File Manager” to copy files from public_html to created subdomain directory.
3. Backup your Database using cPanel >> phpMyAdmin to local PC in .sql format
4. Go to the “MySQL Databases” option in cPanel and create a new database
   Create a new database user for the database
   Add newly created database user to the database created for development website
   Grant all permissions.
5. Import backup to new database from local PC which was downloaded at “step 3”
6. Locate the “options” table and update the siteurl as well home URL

If you are using the different CMS. The system may not recognize the new settings right away, so some additional steps might be necessary

You can now browse new subdomain to test development version of website and modify without it breaking the existing live website.