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This article will show you how to test changes safely online. Making changes to your WordPress website is an important part of keeping it fresh, functional, and updated. Whether you are installing a new plugin, changing your theme, updating WordPress, or adding custom code, making changes directly to your live website can sometimes lead to unexpected issues that affect your visitors.
Testing changes before they go live helps reduce the risk of downtime, broken functionality, or compatibility problems. A staging environment provides a safe space to experiment with updates, design changes, and new features without affecting your production website.
Hosted.com® External link WordPress Hosting supports a streamlined website management experience that allows you to safely develop and test changes before publishing them. This provides greater confidence when making updates and helps ensure a smooth experience for your website visitors.
Creating a testing workflow is considered a best practice for WordPress website management. Whether you manage a personal blog or a business website, testing changes before publishing them helps improve reliability and minimizes disruptions.
A safe testing process typically includes:
- Creating a backup before making changes.
- Testing updates in a staging environment.
- Verifying plugin and theme compatibility.
- Reviewing your website’s appearance and functionality.
- Fixing any issues before publishing changes.
- Monitoring your live website after deployment.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
How to Access Your WordPress Hosting Service
Follow these steps to access your WordPress Hosting account.
1. Login to the Hosted.com® Client Portal using your account credentials.
2. Click the Manage Services dropdown menu and choose WordPress Hosting.
3. On the next page, choose Manage next to your domain.
4. Access the available WordPress management tools and website features included with your hosting plan.
Ways to Test WordPress Changes Safely
The Hosted.com® managed WordPress environment supports a variety of best practices for safely testing website changes.
- Use a Staging Environment: A staging site is a private copy of your live website where you can safely test updates without affecting visitors. You can use a staging environment to test new plugins, install WordPress updates, try a different theme, modify layouts, test custom code, and review design changes before publishing them to your live website.
- Create a Website Backup: Before making significant changes, always create a current backup of your website. If anything goes wrong during testing or deployment, a recent backup allows you to restore your website quickly and minimize downtime.
- Test Plugin Updates: Plugin updates often include new features, security improvements, and bug fixes, but they may also introduce compatibility issues. Testing updates first helps identify any problems before they impact your live website.
- Test Theme Changes: Changing your WordPress theme can significantly alter your website’s appearance and functionality. Testing the new theme allows you to verify that menus, widgets, pages, forms, and other features continue to work as expected.
- Review Website Functionality: After making changes, carefully review your website to ensure pages load correctly, navigation menus operate properly, contact forms function as expected, images display correctly, links are working, and online stores can complete purchases successfully.
- Monitor Website Performance: Some plugins, themes, or customizations may affect website speed. After testing changes, review your website’s loading performance to ensure visitors continue to enjoy a fast browsing experience.
Best Practices for Testing WordPress Changes
Following a structured testing process helps reduce unexpected problems.
- Always back up your website before making changes.
- Test one major change at a time.
- Update plugins before updating themes when appropriate.
- Verify website functionality after every change.
- Check your website on desktop and mobile devices.
- Monitor your website after publishing updates.
- Keep WordPress, themes, and plugins regularly updated.
Additional Information
- Testing changes before publishing helps reduce the risk of downtime and website errors.
- A staging environment allows you to experiment safely without affecting your live website.
- Creating backups before updates provides a reliable recovery option if problems occur.
- Testing plugin compatibility can prevent conflicts that may affect your website’s functionality.
- Reviewing your website after updates helps identify issues before visitors encounter them.
- Monitoring website performance after making changes helps ensure a fast and responsive user experience.
- Regular testing is an important part of maintaining a secure, stable, and reliable WordPress website.
- Combining backups, testing, and ongoing monitoring creates a safer workflow for managing your WordPress website.
Login to Hosted.com® Account
1. Go to the Hosted.com® website Account Login page.
2. Enter your Email and Password and click the Sign In button.
3. You will see the Hosted.com® Dashboard, displaying the Manage Account menu on the left and your Account Information, Account Overview and Open Support Tickets on the right.
Login to cPanel from your Hosted.com® Dashboard
4. Click on Manage Services to view the sub-dropdown menu and select the hosting package for the domain you want to work with – in our example we are using WordPress Hosting.
5. Click the Manage button to the right of the domain name you want to access.
6. The display will now show Product Information, Quick Manage, Resource Usage and Site Statistics for that domain name.
7. Under Product Information, scroll down to Control Panel, which will display cPanel to the right, and click on the Login button.
8. The cPanel Dashboard will now be displa
