What are staging environments?
Making changes to a live site poses a lot of risks. Whether you’re updating a plugin or changing a few lines of code, even the slightest changes could leave your site completely inoperable.
Also known as a staging site, a WordPress staging environment is basically a copy of a live website and is the final quality control step before deploying changes and going live. The main purpose of using staging environments is to test new changes and ensure everything works properly before launching the modifications to your live website.
Using a WordPress staging site to test everything before deploying your website live online helps to eliminate issues and minimize bugs so they won’t negatively impact site visitors. This is especially useful for those that update or make adjustments to their site often. But, even smaller sites can benefit from a staging environment since testing the functionality of WordPress core updates is also vital to keeping your website healthy.