I have a WordPress membership website built with the Paid Membership Pro plugin. I’m using Hostinger hosting and their premium plan, which doesn’t include staging. I need staging to test plugin updates because sometimes they have broken my website before.
So, what I do is manually back up the website using the WPvivid plugin and then restore it to a subdomain ([staging.example.com](https://staging.example.com)). However, there’s a problem: my subdomain sends emails to members if I change something, like their membership plan. To fix this, I installed a plugin called “Stop Emails” to prevent these notifications.
Apart from emails, are there any other things I should take care of, like the payment gateway? Please share how you would set up your staging environment.
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In my opinion you are doing it perfectly aside from the email announcement problem. I do the same thing with Duplicator Pro before installing any updates.
If your site is crashing when you run updates, then you need to fix whatever is causing that, as that shouldn’t be happening. The likely culprits are old/abandoned plugins and themes. Find and replace those. You can see what causes a crash by enabling debugging.
CPanel has sometimes has stuff built in and you can use MAMP Pro too.
You should clean your database of real data on the staging website, that should prevent the email problem also. Or, if you need some test data maybe obfuscate sensitive data, like emails.
Also be sure that your staging website is not crawled by search engines, as that may lead you to have your staging website show up on search results. Better yet, whitelist only the IPs you want to access the website.