Introduction
Website staging is important as it helps in testing the website before it is published to the public. To accomplish this, you need to have a website staging platform. Plesk is one of the platforms that provide a perfect web testing environment for the site.
In this how-to article, we shall cover how to stage a website with Plesk.
Prerequisite
- Plesk Hosting Account
- Website and database files
How to Stage a Website with Plesk
To stage a website you create a new subdomain or domain on Plesk Webspace.
Add a staging domain
Add a new domain staging domain, you can name it staging to differentiate from the production site. Navigate to the dashboard, select Websites, and Domains. Click on Add Domain. Type the domain name and click OK.
Copy Website
To stage a website, you need to Login to Plesk and copy the website to the staging environment. And on the Dashboard, click Websites & Domains.
From the new open window, click Website Copying.
A Copy Files page opens which allows you to choose the site you want to copy. In the Copy Destination section, select Website in Plesk on the radio buttons. Then select the site name from the drop-down.
On the What to do with existing files section you choose either to delete or keep existing files on the destination site. Then click OK. Once the files have been successfully copied, a notification will appear on the bottom right side indicating that The website files were copied.
Copy Databases
From the dashboard on the left side, click Databases and then click Copy.
A new page, Copy Database opens. Then from the Destination database server section, select the localhost: 3306 from the drop-down. From the Destination Database, you Create database with name and then input a name for the database. Then check the Create a full copy. And then click OK.
Publishing the Website
Click on the Websites & Domains then click Hosting Settings.
Once a new page opens, select your site from the domain list. And in the Document root section, write the directory for the website staging environment and then click OK.
If your sites use a connection string, remember to update with the new database settings.
Conclusion
It is easy to stage a website if you follow the above steps. It is important to first test a website before publishing to the public in order to have a view on how it will appear. Plesk is one of the easily available platforms in which one can stage a website.
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