10 Best WordPress Staging Plugins to Make a Test Site in 2024

Looking for the best WordPress staging plugins? Then, you’ve landed in the right place. 

Sometimes when you make changes to your WordPress site, it might go wrong and your site might break. This is where a staging site comes in.

A staging site is a backup site that you can create to safely experiment and make changes to your live WordPress site.

But how do you create a staging site? Simple, you install a WordPress staging plugin. 

In this article, we’ve mentioned the best staging plugin for WordPress-powered websites.

You can also check out our top recommendations if you are in a hurry.

How to Choose a WordPress Staging Plugin for Your Site? 

There are loads of staging plugins for WordPress available so you might get confused about which one to choose.

Here are some tips for you on how you can choose the best staging plugin for WordPress to test your site.

• Ease of Use: Get a plugin that is easy to install and use so you won’t get lost. 
• Security: Make sure the plugins provide data encryption while cloning your site.
• Visibility: The plugin should automatically hide your staging site from search engines. Also, it should block emails to and from the customers on this site.
• Offsite Staging: Setting up the staging site on your server might slow down your production site. Hence, select a plugin that allows setting up a staging site on an offsite server. 
• Technical Support: Running into trouble while creating a staging site is more than possible. Hence, always choose a plugin that provides technical support. 

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10 Best WordPress Staging Plugins to Create Test Site

And now, here are the best WordPress staging plugins to make a test site. So let’s get to know each of the plugins in detail.

1. BlogVault

BlogVault is one of the most reliable backup and staging plugins that offer free cloud storage. It has been trusted by over 4,50,000 websites and has 90,000+ active installations. 

Major Highlights of BlogVault

• The plugin is super easy to set up. All you need to do is install and activate the plugin and you’re good to go. 
• It comes with a built-in free staging option. You can easily customize the staging site as per your wish without hampering any features of your live site.
• This plugin doesn’t slow down your site.
• You can effortlessly manage the live and staging sites from a single dashboard. There’s no need to log in to a separate dashboard to manage your staging site. 
• If you run into any type of problem, BlogVault offers support 24/7. 

Price: Freemium (Premium Plans Start at $149/year for Plus plan)

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2. WP Staging

WP Staging creates an exact copy of your entire site within minutes. Moreover, the plugin can clone your site even if it runs on a weak shared hosting server. Trusted by 80,000+ happy customers, this plugin is worth installing. 

Major Highlights of WP Staging

• You can easily create a clone site by clicking on the button ‘Create New Staging Site’.
• It allows you to clone the whole production site into a subfolder.
• All the data of your site belongs to you and stays on your server. You don’t need any separate accounts. 
• It supports all the major web servers such as Apache, Nginx, and Microsoft IIS.
• Additionally, the plugin allows the cloning of WordPress multisite. 

Price: Freemium (Premium Plans Start at $7.41/month for Personal plan)

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3. UpdraftClone

UpdraftClone is another best staging plugin for WordPress offered by a popular backup plugin, UpdraftPlus. You can easily create a staging site with the help of UpdraftClone. Simply copy and paste your WordPress site, and that’s it, your staging site is created.

Major Highlights of UpdraftClone

• The plugin is super easy to set up.
• You can define the period you want the test site to exist.
• It allows you to clone your site to the UpdraftPlus server for convenience.
• It offers a one-click clean-up feature.
• The plugin provides security by encrypting data while transferring. 

Price: Freemium (Premium Plans Start at $70/year for Personal Plan)

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4. WP Time Capsule

WP Time Capsule is a backup and staging plugin created especially for business owners, eCommerce, and agencies. Furthermore, it allows you to connect to the cloud app where you can store the backup files. 

Major Highlights of WP Time Capsule

• It allows you to back up your site in real-time. This way, you can revert your site to how it looked before. 
• You can make changes and updates on staging with just a single click.  
• The plugin auto-backup before every update. Furthermore, if there is any mistake during updates, it offers easy restoration as well.
• It encrypts your DB backups and adds an extra layer of security. 
• It only includes selected files and database tables to your live site instead of data of the entire site. 

Price: Freemium (Premium Plans Start at $49/year for Business Plan)

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5. BoldGrid

BoldGrid is a total solution that provides an easy way to create a staging site to test new plugins or themes. Furthermore, the plugin has 80,000+ active installations making it one of the trusted WordPress staging plugins.

Major Highlights of BoldGrid

• You can create a fully functioning staging site with just a few clicks. You can test themes, plugins, and other site changes without fear of breaking your live site.
• Furthermore, it offers selective staging. You can clone your entire site or just the selective content.
• The ‘Site Check’ feature monitors your site at a specified period and notifies you if any problem is detected.
• It comes with an ‘Auto Rollback’ feature that creates a backup before updates. So, you can restore your site in case an update fails.
• The plugin has an amazing support team. You can contact them anytime to get help if you run into any issues. 

Price: Freemium (Premium Plans Start at $2.50/month)

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6. Duplicator

Duplicator, as the name suggests, allows you to duplicate your live site and create a staging site. Furthermore, the plugin provides zero downtime. That means you can duplicate your site without any interruptions. 

Major Highlights of Duplicator

• The plugin is multi-threaded, hence it works well even with large websites and databases.  
• You can connect to cPanel and make changes to your stage site without switching to your web hosting account. 
• It offers email notifications.
• This plugin also provides migration & cloning and cloud storage to Dropbox and Google Drive.
• It provides professional support to every customer.

Price: Freemium (Premium Plans Start at $49.50/year for Basic Plan)

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7. WP Stagecoach

Yet another WordPress staging plugin in this list is WP Stagecoach. The plugin works on any host and doesn’t overwrite your database during import. 

Major Highlights of WP Stagecoach

• The plugin allows you to create a staging site with just a single click.
• It provides SSL support to the staging site.
• You can choose to import files databases or both.
• With the help of this plugin, you can easily push your staging site to a live site with just a click. 
• You can merge the databases without losing your content while copying the staging site to the live domain.

Price: (Premium Plans Start at $99/year for Small Plan)

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8. All-in-One WP Migration

All-in-One WP Migration is a migration plugin. However, you can create a staging site as well. This migration and staging plugin has 5+ million active installations due to its reliable services. It comes with a wide range of services, and all of them are quite useful.

Major Highlights of All-in-One WP Migration

• You can export your WordPress files, including the database.
• The plugin is compatible with most web hosting providers.
• It doesn’t require any PHP extensions and works with all versions of PHP from v5.2.17 onwards.
• It offers a true mobile experience on WordPress versions 3.3 and up.
• The plugin provides amazing support if you run into complex problems. Furthermore, the premium version includes premium support.

Price: Freemium (Premium Plans Start at $69/year for Unlimited Extension)

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9. WPvivid 

WPvivid is also a backup & migration plugin. But, it allows the creation of a staging site as well. Additionally, the plugin gets rid of unused images from your site. This makes your site load much faster. 

Major Highlights of the WPvivid

• The plugin enables you to create and push staging to a live site effortlessly.
• It offers WordPress multisite backup.
• It provides data encryption while migrating the site. 
• You can create staging for WordPress multisite.
• You can choose to back up your entire site (database + files), all files, or database only. 

Price: Freemium (Premium Plans Start at $29.4/year for Blogger Plan).

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10. WP Synchro

WP Synchro is a WordPress staging and migration plugin developed for WP developers, by WP developers. One of the unique features of WP Synchro is that it keeps the staging site in sync with your production site. Furthermore, the plugin is perfect for development, staging, and production environments.

Major Highlights of WP Synchro 

• You can set up the plugin once and run it multiple times. 
• It enables you to pull/push databases from one site to another site.
• It provides high security because no other sites and servers are involved and all data is encrypted while transferring.
• You can move only the selected database tables or just move all. 
• The plugin lets you back up the database before migration.

Price: Freemium (Premium Plans Start at $8/month for Personal plan)

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Wrapping It Up!

And that’s all about the WordPress staging plugins. In conclusion, staging plugins is important to test the new updates, themes, plugins, and content without breaking your production site. 

If you’re still confused about which staging plugin to choose then we recommend BlogVault. It’s easy to install and use. 

Finally, we hope you enjoyed reading this article and if you did, share it with your friends.

Want to read more articles? Then, you can check out our article on the best WordPress plugins.

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