Staging Archives - Business Bloomer

Best Plugins for Cloning and Staging WP Multisite WooCommerce Instances

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a user inquired about reliable plugins for duplicating, cloning, and creating staging environments specifically for WooCommerce multisite setups.

Managing staging for multisite networks, especially with multiple subsites across different countries, can be challenging due to compatibility and the need for seamless synchronization.

Although there are many options for staging, selecting one that handles multisite requirements effectively is essential. Let’s explore a few recommended tools that are up for the task, even with complex configurations.

WooCommerce: How to Safely Update Via Staging

When a new version of the WooCommerce plugin is released, and the WordPress dashboard starts sending you notifications that it’s time to update, this question comes always to mind: “Should I update WooCommerce right now, wait a little longer, or stay on the same version unless something breaks?“

Well, updating WooCommerce is ALWAYS a big risk – potentially you can break your live website and miss out on traffic and sales. This can happen every time a significant update is released – many store owners don’t update their stores because they feel the hassle is not worth the effort.

But updating WooCommerce is definitely a good idea for the long-term. The main cause of WordPress hacking is because of out-of-date plugins and themes. And this is where staging environments come in.

A staging website is a clone of your existing live store. It’s completely separate and it doesn’t affect your live store in any way. Staging is also called “testing environment” or “sandbox”, while your live site is usually called “production environment”.

Staging gives you the benefit of 1-click-cloning in a few minutes, updating and testing WooCommerce without worrying about breaking your actual live website, and finally “pushing” the changes to the live website (a.k.a. overwriting the live environment), so the functioning is 100% guaranteed.

WooCommerce: How to Clone/Migrate (Step by Step)?

Maybe you don’t have staging, and you need to clone your WooCommerce website elsewhere to test updates or new functionality (because you’re not doing that on a live website, right?). Maybe you need to migrate an existing WooCommerce website to another server. Or, like me, maybe you need to copy an entire WooCommerce website on a fresh subdomain in order to write this step-by-step tutorial!

Either way, the free Duplicator plugin, available on the official WordPress.org repository, is your best friend. Whether you need to duplicate, clone, migrate, copy or even backup your WooCommerce website, Duplicator is the most straight forward system to achieve that.

Of course, is not super simple and this is why you’re reading this step-by-step tutorial about duplicating WooCommerce websites (including helpful screenshots). Hope this is helpful to those of you who need to achieve a complex and delicate operation (cloning/migrating is ALWAYS a delicate thing) within few steps.

All you need is an existing WooCommerce website, the Duplicator plugin, an FTP client (or File Manager) and access to the server where you will create the new subdomain and blank database. All the rest is handled by the plugin, so here’s the tutorial you were waiting for.

WooCommerce: Disable Update Notifications @ WordPress Dashboard

We talked a lot about safely updating WooCommerce. The same applies to WordPress core, other plugins, themes… WordPress is such a delicate piece of software that you should ALWAYS know what to do before actually doing it 🙂

Sometimes, website managers feel great about clicking on that “Update Now” link in their WordPress dashboard. It seems – and it is – so easy. Problem is, they’ll likely break the website.

The best way of doing this properly is to run the updates (as well as custom code, plugin tests, design changes) on a “staging environment“, which should be provided by your hosting company.

Either way, those “Update Now” links are too dangerous. Only you (the developer) need to know that – while it’d be better if the other users who have access to the dashboard didn’t see anything and concentrated on WooCommerce orders or WordPress post and content editing.

Clearly, there is a way to disable the update notifications on a per-user basis or, even easier, to only have 1 user (possibly you) see these. The snippet is a little complex, but there is a lot of literature online – this is the one that worked for me! Continue reading WooCommerce: Disable Update Notifications @ WordPress Dashboard

WooCommerce: What’s the Best Hosting Provider?

As a WooCommerce user, WooCommerce blogger and WooCommerce developer I often hear this question: “What’s the best hosting platform for a WooCommerce website?“.

Well, first and foremost, there is no “best” hosting for WooCommerce (and WordPress in general).

There are so many choices out there that defining the “best” is impossible. Besides, if there were a “best” hosting provider, there would be only one hosting company left in business.

WooCommerce: Fixing “Outdated Copies of WooCommerce Templates”

We’ve all been there… WooPanic! What do I need to do? What on earth is happening? Is my website going to break?

First of all, relax 🙂 Not much to worry about.

In this post, we’ll see why that notice appears, what problems it could cause and what you can do to fix it. Continue reading WooCommerce: Fixing “Outdated Copies of WooCommerce Templates”