Staging Environment:
- Purpose: Testing and experimenting with changes before making them public on your live website.
- Accessibility: Not publicly accessible. Only you, as the website owner, can access the staging site.
- Benefits:
- Safe testing ground for:
- Theme and plugin updates
- New functionalities
- Code modifications
- Design changes
- Minimize risk of breaking your live website
- Identify and fix issues before they impact users
- Safe testing ground for:
- Drawbacks:
- Requires additional resources (storage, bandwidth)
- May need manual setup (depending on hosting plan)
Live Environment:
- Purpose: Publicly accessible version of your website that visitors can see and interact with.
- Accessibility: Visible to everyone on the internet.
- Benefits:
- Represents the actual website users experience
- Provides real-time feedback on changes
- Drawbacks:
- Mistakes or issues can negatively impact user experience and reputation
- Reverting changes can be time-consuming
Choosing the right environment:
Always use the staging environment before pushing changes live, especially for critical updates or modifications. The live environment should only reflect tested and finalized versions of your website.
