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How To Properly Test WordPress Website Before Going Live?

Khush Mehndiratta -

Before making a site live for public use, you should check the design of your website, all plugin issues, and also check for all grammatical errors. You should also check that service of your website should correctly work on mobile devices.

Methods to properly test your site before making it live

There are basically 6 steps that you should always check before making your WordPress website live:-

  1. Preview your posts with WordPress editor - WordPress has more than tons of useful features to review your site and it provides you many features to check your post and page review of your site. If you are writing your posts, don't publish them blindly instead of this select the preview link at the top of the WordPress editor. From this option, you can preview your content view on desktop, tablet, and mobile on a new tab also. You can also restore and publish your previous versions of your posts.
  2. You can also preview the WordPress theme with Live Preview - Before making your website live always check that your current theme is outdated or not. To preview the theme of your WordPress site navigate to Appearance > Themes from the dashboard of WordPress. To preview the theme just hover on the thumbnail of your theme and then click the live preview button. After this option, you can clearly check all the settings of your theme and if it is completely correct then you can save and publish it.
  3. Preview Settings and Widgets with WordPress Live Customizer - With the use of pre-defined themes of WordPress you can make your site user-friendly. To make your site look comfortable and attractive for others, you can add some widgets to the sidebar of your site and can show blog posts on your homepage. You can manually change this setting by navigating to Appearance > Widgets from your dashboard. You can change this sidebar setting even after clicking on customizing which is on the top of the toolbar. After clicking, the current version of your website will open on a new screen. Here you will be introduced to different settings for your site like Site Identity, Header, Menus, Widgets, Homepage settings, etc. After adding some features through customizer you can take the preview of your site before making it live.
  4. Preview Landing pages of your site with SpeedProd - Use SpeedProd in WordPress if you want to make successful loading pages of your website and you can easily make an instant live. This SpeedProd is a good WordPress landing page builder which contains coming soon and under maintenance functions. It provides you drag and drop builder and allows you to create landing pages for your site. After completing your landing page you can check the mobile preview of your site and it will open the preview of your site in mobile and if you need any changes before making it live you can update it with the help of SpeedProd. You can also preview and update in Desktop view also and don't forget to save the landing page.
  5. Previewing Development Work with Staging Environments - You can also create a staging site which is also known as a development site which will be the clone of your live site and you can conduct all necessary tests and you can change your staging site accordingly to the tests. After your staging site is ready then it is time to make all the changes in our live site which we did in our staging site. Bluehost hosting service provides you an option where you can create a staging site, many hosting services don't provide it. If you are using the Bluehost service then navigate to WordPress admin and then Bluehost > Staging to create a staging site. You can do necessary changes in the staging site and once completed you need to deploy all these changes to your live site. After this process, you can set your site to live for everyone.
  6. Letting Clients Preview Their Site Before Going Live - It is one of the best ways to test your site. To do this process you need to install the SpeddProd landing page plugin which provides you complete power to keep the construction process of your site secret from the public. You can add a coming soon menu for your site by navigating to SpeedProd > Pages to see different landing pages. Under page, settings go to access control menu to view all different ways to allow clients to preview your website. The easiest way to do this is to use a Bypass Url option, from here you can give your clients a secret URL that can bypass yours are coming soon page only for the clients who have that URL. From this, they can view your site before making it live and they can help you if some changes should be needed for your website.

So we had covered all the points which one should use to test their site before making it live for everyone preview.

Thanks for Reading. Hope you liked it.

NOTE:- The amazing artwork used in this article is designed by Rudityas W Anggoro.