Introduction

Softaculous is a convenient and intuitive auto-installer available in cPanel and other web hosting control panels that allow you to use a few clicks and deploy various web applications and use them to build websites, CRMs, ERPs, and online stores. In addition to this, it also allows you to create application backups, clones, and, of course - staging environments. 

In this tutorial specifically, we will review the creation of a staging environment using Softaculos. Our example will include WordPress, which is the world's most widely used application. 

To make things as understandable as possible, we will try to provide an example to which you can relate and follow to easily create staging environments on your own!

Suppose you are a new customer of HostArmada, and you have only just taken the next step to make your online project a reality: choosing a domain name after settling on one of our hosting plans. These initial steps are all too necessary to get your website online so that people can visit it through their browsers. The result is often referred to as a 'live' or 'public' site.

Shortly afterward, you decided that your online project would be built via WordPress. Either with assistance from our dedicated support team or by yourself, you’ve installed and set up WordPress for your domain name and have already begun working on it. Congratulations! However, maintaining a WordPress website is a never-ending process. Even after you’ve built your site, laid the groundwork, and started to attract visitors, you will still likely continue to update and make adjustments indefinitely as your project keeps on growing. For this specific reason, this means you will need to find a way to test those changes without negatively impacting your website or its visitors.

That is the exact moment that website staging comes into play!

A staging environment or (staging site) is essentially a clone of your website, independent of your live site, that visitors can see. It has the same settings, software, and hardware as your live site but is safely placed in a separate area while you work on it. This is why a staging site is similar in many ways to a live site, but its purpose is very different. Staging sites are private — not intended for just anyone to visit. They’re used as an excellent tool for experimenting and testing. For that reason, they’re also frequently called ‘testing’ or ‘development’ sites.

Why is having a staging website important?

Website staging is a crucial feature in any exceptional hosting package because it allows you to make changes to your website without interrupting your live site. This means no downtime while making changes, so you can keep on engaging your readers and or selling products. This also means you won’t take a hit on your SEO ranking because search engines won’t be indexing the staging copy of your site.

Here are some other scenarios where having a staging website would be incredibly beneficial to your online project:

• Re-designing your website while keeping the old one active to avoid downtime and interruptions.
• Installing a new plugin or theme.
• Making routine updates to your themes or plugins, including testing new features and functionality
• Troubleshooting and testing solutions to any errors that are giving you trouble.

Now, of course, all of this can easily be done on your live website. That being said, it is nothing short of a risky proposition because if you try out a new plugin or test a bug fix on your public site, you risk breaking something in the process.

You could also end up slowing down your website temporarily, causing downtime, or otherwise interfering with your visitors’ experience. And don’t get us started on the issues you would face if you wanted to redesign the live site from scratch without a staging website!

Does HostArmada offer website staging?

Around this point, you are likely wondering whether or not we offer this option with our assortment of web hosting plans... And we are happy to confirm that HostArmada does indeed provide this option, and our support team will always be here to assist you with this process should you encounter any issues along the way!

While there are various ways to set up a staging environment manually and equally manage it the same way, in this tutorial, we will be talking about one of the easy to use and automatic staging features offered by the Softaculous Apps Installer, already present in the cPanel provided by HostArmada with the purchase of a hosting plan by default!

How to use Softaculous Staging?

Before we get into the step by step guide on how to use this feature, it is important to list a few things for reference that are important to keep in mind.

Staging functionality is available only for a few applications, and the developers of Softaculous are looking to add more. If your site were installed manually instead of through Softaculous, you would have to import it to Softaculous first.

The application we will use as an example will be based on WordPress, and this tutorial already assumes that the installation of WordPress has been done through Softaculous. Should you wish to install WordPress, we have another tutorial that can be of assistance for that! You can find that one by clicking here.

Without further ado, let us begin with the process of setting up a staging environment.

To begin the process of creating a staging environment, you need to access the cPanel service for your web hosting account. If you are not sure how to do that, please follow our tutorial on Accessing the cPanel Service.

After performing the above action and once you are logged in to your cPanel service, please use the cPanel search field and type in “Softaculous Apps Installer”. Doing so will filter out the functionality and will conveniently provide you with the result you are searching for.

Alternatively, you can search for the functionality under the cPanel "Software" features group, and once you find it, you can click to access it.

Once you find the functionality using any of the above-mentioned methods, please navigate to the “Installations” content box and click on it.



By clicking on the "Installations" content box, Softaculous will redirect you to a table section containing all your applications installed via Softaculous. To begin the staging process, please click on the "Create Staging" button corresponding to the application you want to create a staging environment for. 

When you do that, you will be redirected to the staging page where you will see details about the current application and a form where you can fill in the staging configuration details.

Here are the details you will need to fill out under the above-mentioned staging configuration form:

• Choose Protocol -  Please use this drop-down menu to select the protocol for your staging environment. You can choose between HTTP and HTTPS. You should select HTTPS if you’d like your website to run with an SSL certificate and HTTP if you want it to run without it.
• Choose Domain -  Please use the drop-down menu here to select the domain name you would like to create the staging environment for.
• In Directory -  Please use this text field to type in the directory under which you would like to deploy your staging environment. It will appear to the right of your domain name, e.g., it will be www.website.com/staging if you type in “staging” inside the In Directory field. This is not mandatory, and if you wish the staging area to be deployed under the main domain or sub-domain directory, you can leave this field empty.
• Database Name -  Please use this text field to type in the name of the database to be created for the staging installation. It has to be a different name than that of your original website.
• Disable Search Engine Visibility - Please use this check box to disable or enable search engine visibility for your new staging area. If checked, this shall discourage search engines from indexing this site. It is up to search engines to honor this request. This is recommended for staging environments.
• Site Name - Please use this text field to type in the name for your staging environment. If you want to use the same site name as the source site, leave this field blank. This is a suggested setting for a staging website.

Please fill in all the required details above, and finally, when you are ready, click on the “Create Staging” button located at the bottom of the page.

That should do the trick! The time taken may vary depending on the size of your installation, so please be patient.

There you have it! You have successfully created a WordPress staging environment for your website. We hope our tutorial was helpful, and if you felt uncomfortable doing this before, you should have the confidence to perform it on your own now! Of course, if you face any issues with creating your staging area, don't hesitate to get in touch with our technical support team by using the live chat or via our ticketing system in our Client Area.