Our OnSiteWP WordPress maintenance plans work with all hosting services. There are some really good hosting services for WordPress and some poor ones. Let’s talk about one of the better managed hosting service providers: WP Engine.
The WP Engine web hosting service is based on a custom hosting control panel. They have custom hooks into WordPress to make it connect together nicely with the hosting. We will use some of these special features to make our site updates safer.
In order to safely run updates, we will take advantage of the staging site functionality provided by WP Engine.
Staging sites are a quick and easy way to make a copy of your site. This copy can be worked on without impacting your live site.
The basic procedure is as follows:
One thing we should note is that if you have a busy site that takes e-commerce orders or receives data from users, you need to pause accepting orders while you work on the staging site or you can lose those orders when it’s time to make the site go live again. This is called putting the website into maintenance mode. For larger companies, they have predefined times when this is allowable. (such as 10pm-midnight on a Thursday).