Creating Staging Sites with Your Plesk Shared Hosting Account

Plesk has the tools you need to create a staging environment for your website. Web professionals consider this kind of workflow a "best practice" for building out a Website; it solves a lot of problems Web developers encounter including simplified relative paths and fully functional Website previewing.

To Create a Staging Website

1. Add a new subdomain to your Plesk shared hosting account (more info). We recommend using something like staging.

   If your domain name and hosting account are not in the same GoWebsite account, you will need to create a new A record for your subdomain that points to your hosting account's IP address (more info).

2. Copy your existing website (we'll refer to it as "the main Website") to the new subdomain, which we'll call "the staging Website" (more info).
3. Verify your Website copy over correctly by visiting your staging Website through your Web browser.

Working with Staging Websites

At the most basic level, you will develop your website using the staging Website — you'll modify its files instead of your main Website.

Once you've finished developing the Website using the staging environment, you'll copy the staging Website to your main Website(more info). Voila! You've now got the new version of your website visible on your main Website.

When you're ready to develop your main Website further, proceed copying it to the staging Website (overwriting its old files) and repeat this process.

It is important to note, though, that staging Websites do not copy databases. You can, however, create copies of databases by going to the Database page in Plesk or export/import your database's contents through phpMyAdmin.