Here are 5 great reasons to have a staging or development site. A note to remember for this post is that staging and development are used as synonyms, however there large corporations general have four or more websites and they can actually be two different things.
1. Backup
Disclaimer: Backups for your website should be done through cPanel and files should be stored in a secure place. A staging website only serves as a backup under specific conditions.
The only time a development site would serve as a backup is if you did not make any changes. This is not the best use of a staging environment, but a use nonetheless.
2. Website Modifications
The highest and best use of a staging website. Making modifications on your production site can be extremely stressful and sometimes detrimental. Take the heat off and make risk free changes to your staging environment and when you’re ready, simply push the update live.
3. Less Downtime
A staging website gives you less downtime because all the changes you are making to the production site are pushed and is nearly instant. Editing the live site directly be problematic especially if you set the live site in some temporary construction mode, and then you’re not able to revert it back due to something such as your internet goes down!
4. Quality Assessment
This is very important for ecommerce and more complex websites. QA is about testing all the functions and moving parts on the site before going live. Can you imagine if Amazon didn’t do this?
5. Low Cost
Purchase your web hosting with Kiiff and you can even make a staging site on a subdomain. See more in the video below.