Has anyone ever said, “As a publisher in a content-driven landscape, you are responsible for producing unique content every day,” and you scratched your head at the amount of resources it would take to craft something meaningful on a daily basis? Creating original content for your site can be exhausting if you don’t have the budget, staff, or time to publish day in and day out. Research from Ascend2 shows “lack of content creation resources” as the most cited challenge to content marketing success. Therefore, you may often find yourself in a struggle to fill up your editorial calendar. That’s where content curation comes in. Content curation is a powerful strategy you can leverage to produce effective content for your site. It involves sifting through a mountain of information on a certain topic and plucking out the best content to present to your audience. While all curated information must include attribution to the original source, you can (and should) add your own commentary, headlines, or visuals to increase the value you provide. Why go through the hassle? For more than one reason. Content curation helps in: Improving brand visibility. More than 50 percent of marketers that practice content curation indicate that it has increased their buyer engagement, web traffic and overall visibility. (Source) Increasing click-through-rate. Posts having links to third-party websites result in 33 percent more clicks than posts linking to owned websites. Curation clearly dominates clicks. (Source) Generate sales-ready leads. 41 percent of marketers that curate content state it has increased the quality and/or number of their sales-ready leads. (Source) It is important not to get confused between content curation and content aggregation. The latter doesn’t include commentary or other elements. Content is simply pulled from third-party sources and presented to the audience without changes. Also, it is often complied automatically without considering quality. Nobody prefers aggregated content. It sucks. People want the best content. Content that is hand-picked based on quality. And all that comes from content curation. Content Curation in Action As they say in screenwriting, it’s more fitting to show rather than tell. To that end we’ve decided to share a few examples of content curation in real life. 1. Round-Up of Tools, Resources & Apps Have you ever been inspired by a tool? A marketing tool? Or have you ever gone through a list of tools and discovered useful options that you weren’t aware of? If you’ve already bookmarked a series of blog posts that talk about tools, there’s a likely chance you’ve already witnessed curated content. Websites often collect a description of tools that people regularly use, and follow it up with their own insight regarding what it does, its benefits, or how you apply it in a business setting. Here’s an example, from Buffer’s blog: This is a viable strategy to not only post great information for your audience but also develop a relationship with publishers whom you’re fond of. 2. Insights from Experts There’s more to content curation than just round ups. Some websites have created a hub of information on specific subjects like technology. Since topics like these are fairly broad, it is difficult for publishers to create all original content by themselves to fill up their content calendar. Consequently, insights from subject matter experts is a welcome addition to site owners looking to curate third-party content around specific topics. The external perspective can be combined with original voice to present a slew of content to your audience. Take a look at this example: The site gets high marks for thoughtfully weaving in quotes from key opinion leaders. Also, the author has integrated her own thoughts into the piece. When you publish such content, be sure to link back to the expert’s site in attempt to make them notice your post. Managing to get their attention early will make it easy for you to gather new insights or quotes from them in the future. 3. Interviews Even if you manage to scale your content marketing using curation, an important hurdle still remains. You have to ensure that the curated part is of interest to your target audience. Without this, you will fail to attract or hold their attention. One of the effective ways to gauge their interest is using interviews. Curated content with the most engagement isn’t always found in the most obvious settings for your industry. Anybody can curate articles from popular websites. The effort doesn’t stand out. Interviews, on the other hand, show that you’ve worked hard to connect with an important figure in your industry. Below is an example, from Yotpo’s interview featuring Tommy Walker of Shopify Plus: Interviews allow you to showcase how an authority figure feels about a certain topic, what information they have on it already, and what is their personal take on it. Getting Started With Content Curation on WordPress Content curation on WordPress can feel overwhelming if you don’t know where to start. It involves being on the lookout for relevant content, saving excerpts or posts you wish to use later, and adding to the information to offer your own unique perspective. Luckily, there are some handy practices and tools that make it convenient to discover and curate top content. Let’s first look at the ones that you can use outside WordPress. Curation with Content Discovery Tools It’s not easy to pick out the best pieces of content when you have to go through a lot of sources. Incredibly, the tools mentioned below can do a lot of searching work on your behalf. 1. Quora Quora is one of the best places to find the most authoritative content on any subject matter. Questions are answered by individuals with expert knowledge on specific topics. The best contributions sit at the top courtesy of a voting system. However, the best answers don’t necessarily provide most value to an audience. Search the site deeper for factually verified and well researched content. 2. Feedly Feedly provides quick, mobile-optimized content pieces via RSS feeds. You can browse content from your favorite YouTube channels, blogs and news sites to get ideas for upcoming posts. The tool is also great for keeping tabs on hot conversations in your industry. Users are able to add a few of their favorite sources to Feedly. All you have to do is open your favorite blog, copy its URL from the search bar and add it in your Feedly account. 3. Alltop With Alltop, you get access to aggregated content. The site gathers news pieces, blog posts and stories from popular places all over the internet. If used correctly, you can speed up your content discovery process. Articles are nicely grouped into categories and with specific keyword searches, you can quickly discover sites and blogs that feature the latest prices related to your industry. Once you hand pick the best content, you can curate it by repurposing it in your own words or by adding your own commentary to it. 4. Google Advanced Search Google Advanced Search provides quick and easy access to specific content. You can also narrow results by timeframe and domain name, ensuring that you always get relevant and up-to-date information. For instance, you can search the domain “techcrunch.com” if you’re looking for interesting content related to technology and use key terms like “latest stories” and “top news” to discover fresh information about the technology industry on a given webpage. 5. ExpertFile This site lends authority to curated content because it pulls content from industry experts and leaders. You will learn new things about your industry from people who are driving it forward and innovating. Learn how to drive traffic to a WordPress website from a pro WordPress user, or how to design a beautiful landing page from a top web designer, all while gathering valuable content ideas to curate. Learnist has a huge backlog of expert insights on a variety of topics, so you’re almost certain to discover something for your target audience. 6. SlideShare SlideShare hosts great content that is presented to the audience in a series of educational slides. The slides are visually appealing and often include nuggets of knowledge that can boost page views for your WordPress site. Rather than just curating valuable information filled with your own commentary and a list of excerpts, take a page from SlideShare’s book by turning curated content into a slideshow where each section has its own commentary and image. Slideshows can also be repurposed into Facebook posts, tweets, LinkedIn updates, and more. Content Curation with WordPress Plugins Within WordPress, you can handle content curation through a variety of plugins. These come in handy when you’re searching for new content on a variety of subjects, but have less time on your hands. Some plugins have been purposely designed to support curation, while others are WordPress variants of popular web-based curation services. What follows is our compilation of plugin options that enable you to effortlessly curate content. 1. MyCurator This plugin offers a mix of content curation and aggregation to allow WordPress users to provide the most relevant information. Once you define your sources, the plugin will deliver content through RSS feeds, and then articles can be curated from those or other sources that you manually find. Upon selecting an article, the plugin pre-fills the post by pulling some of its information, allowing you to insert your own commentary. This works well for site owners who want to publish full posts around curated information. 2. Editorial Assistant by Sovrn This plugin is for WordPress users who want to publish their own content, but love to get ideas from several high-quality sources published on the internet about the same subject. Editorial Assistant offers the best content and also enables you to pull images from the original source with just a single click. Another benefit of this plugin is that it’s time efficient. You get a point and click interface from which the related information, visuals and citations can be added. All functionality works in harmony with your production effort in order to increase engagement and visibility of your WordPress site. 3. CM Curated List Manager This is a handy plugin that enables WordPress users to create appealing curated lists that can be organized by tags, categories, and sub-categories. Links come with cookie-enabled checkboxes that allow readers to save their progress. In addition, icons are created from the URL of an entry to add organization and style. Essentially, you’re able to create an ultimate resource on a subject with CM Curated List Manager. The plugin also enables you to add blog posts from your website to the organized list, which helps drive readers to stellar content in one place, instead of making them bounce from page to page. 4. ExpressCurate This is an ideal plugin for WordPress users who need to rapidly scale content production efforts with limited resources, time, and budget. By prefilling the original information and visuals, ExpressCurate gives you a powerful starting point for content marketing. Moreover, the plugin presents you with an annotation area where you can add your perspective, format post, choose an image, determine the link type you want to include, and a lot more. Users can publish the curated post immediately or schedule it for another time. 5. WP RSS Aggregator You can use this plugin to stream RSS feeds from different sources directly on your WordPress site. Get started by simply choosing your sources and embedding shortcodes on your webpages or posts. WP RSS Aggregator allows you to import any number of feed items. Additionally, the plugin enables you to tailor feed output with customization options like scheduling imports from feeds, limiting posts’ age, and selecting how many posts to display. And with Premium add-ons, you can import RSS feed into your post directly. Final Verdict Content curation is a great way to deliver high value content to your audience while saving time. Get started by looking at your existing content marketing strategy and find areas where curation fits in. The tips and resources mentioned above will ensure that you’re equipped with the necessary tools and knowledge to slay content production challenges.
On September 16th, 2014, a new world record was set when 12,091 people attended the largest ever webinar held by Glavbukh in Russia. What makes this figure so astounding is the fact that only ten years earlier, almost nobody had even heard the word “webinar”. In recent years, many businesses have come to realize the amazing potential of webinars as a marketing tool. A 2016 survey by Content Marketing Institute found that webinars ranked as the 2nd most effective kind of marketing content, behind only in-person events. The power of webinars has become so well known that 66% of marketers are now using them as part of their marketing strategy. Webinars also help to position your brand in a competitive space. If you’re considering joining a large number of business who have had amazing success using webinars, it’s important to know as much as you can about how to run a successful webinar. This article will show you why webinars are a fantastic marketing tool and help you choose webinar software that suits your specific needs. Skip below to see our ultimate ten step guide to setting up a free and fully functional webinar on your WordPress site, and give you some tips for making your webinar a success. What Is a Webinar? The word webinar, which is a portmanteau of the words web and seminar, refers to a presentation, workshop or seminar that is transmitted over the web using video conferencing software. Businesses and organizations have long recognized the value of seminars. They allow people to discuss issues and exchange ideas, learn new information from industry leaders, network with peers and clients and generate warm leads. The biggest problem with seminars is that they are expensive and time consuming for both the organizers and participants. Webinars remove these hurdles by allowing people to attend from their home, office or any place that has an internet connection. As many webinars offer on-demand access, people who are unable to participate in the live event can watch the webinar at a later date. Why Make a Webinar? Here are six great reasons you should be using webinars. Webinars are convenient. You can catch up with business partners and customers from your home or office. It’s also convenient for attendees as they don’t need to travel. If you provide recorded content, attendees can watch your webinar anytime without having to worry about time differences. Increased convenience means that more people are likely to sign up. Webinars are cost-effective. Live seminars require paying for advertising, catering, displays, staff, transport and a place to hold the event. All you really need for an effective webinar is a computer and an internet connection. Webinars allow you to promote your business and increase your exposure to a much wider audience. Anyone around the world can join your webinar, giving you access to more potential customers. Webinars can help build your credibility and establish trust with your audience. Your audience can see you and interact with you, which is the next best thing to meeting face to face. Webinars have the added advantage of putting you in front of hundreds or even thousands of people at the same time. Webinars let you interact directly with your target audience, which helps you get a better understanding of their needs and challenges. Understanding what motivates them allows you to tailor your products, services, and advice to match their needs. Webinars are fantastic for lead generation. During the signup process, you can collect names, email addresses and other information from your audience. The best part is that these are all qualified leads from people who are interested in your product or service. Still not convinced? Consider this – the average conversion rate for a landing page is about 2.35%. A conversion rate between 5% and 10% is considered “outstanding”. Yet recent studies have shown that between 20% and 40% of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads. That means that if you have 100 people attend your webinar, between 20 and 40 of them are likely to become paying clients. If you have a WordPress site and you’re not using webinars, you’re missing out on a fantastic opportunity to increase credibility with your customers, expand your brand awareness, learn more about your current customers, gain valuable customer leads, and access a profitable revenue stream. Setting up a WordPress webinar shouldn’t take longer than an hour. Choosing WordPress Webinar Software There are many different software packages on the market that allow you to add webinar functionality to your WordPress site. Here are some important questions you need to ask when choosing webinar software. Do I want a complete service that takes care of everything from registration to attendee feedback? Are basic features such as a video stream and a chat enough, or do I need advanced features such as detailed analytics, file sharing, and polling? Do I need webinar software that can easily integrate with 3rd party apps and services such as YouTube, Facebook, iCal, Microsoft Office, LinkedIn and payment gateways? Do I want to pay for software or would I prefer a free option? Paid WordPress Webinar Software If you’d prefer a paid option with extended features, here are three popular choices. WP Webinar is an easy to use software designed specifically for WordPress. Here are some of the best features of this plugin. Focuses on simplicity and ease of use, which means it’s a good choice for inexperienced WordPress users. Installation can be completed in just 30 seconds. Create recurring webinars that are scheduled to broadcast multiple times per day or week. Utilize your own WordPress theme to keep consistency between your site and your webinar page, or choose one of the customizable pre-made themes included with the plugin. Numerous customizable features such as video size, headers, and button text allow you to create a webinar that looks original. Integrate with any autoresponder on the market and output the code into a fully customizable webinar opt-in. Create a Thank You page that integrates with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter to help your webinar go viral. Add Call to Action areas that are set to appear at specific times during your presentation. Use the Follow-Up System to create automated messages that remind your attendees to watch your webinar. A one-time payment that doesn’t require yearly renewals, which makes it a very cost-effective choice. Purchase includes lifetime updates so you can have access to the latest features as they are released. A one-time purchase starts at $197 for a single site and $247 for multiple sites WP WebinarSystem is a customizable software that lets people without technical skills create a functional webinar. Here are some of the best features of this plugin. Webinars are based on Google Hangouts on Air which allows for an almost unlimited amount of viewers. All webinar pages are responsive and mobile-friendly, which means people can access the webinar from any device. Create a landing page for attendee registration, display a countdown timer for your webinar, and send reminders and notifications through the built-in email system. Use the Incentive Box to deliver presents, downloads or bonuses to your attendees. Set automated or recurring webinars that display a recorded video at a set time and date. Integrates with WooCommerce and several other major payment gateways, which allows you to charge people for attending your webinar. Create Call to Action buttons that appear at set times during a live or recorded webinar. These buttons allow you to redirect your attendees to an affiliate, add to cart or checkout link. Attendees can ask private questions that will appear on your dashboard in real-time. If you’re running an automated webinar, these questions can be redirected to your mailbox. Comes with an integrated live chat system, so you don’t need to install any third-party software. Collect attendee information when they sign up and export it to a text or CSV file. WP WebinarSystem is available in 26 languages. There is a free version which has limited features and a Pro version which starts at $197 for a single site or $497 for unlimited sites. Webinar Ignition is a professional and flexible platform that integrates with any WordPress theme and is simple to set up. Here are some of the best features of this plugin. Create live or automated webinars that can be linked to any video stream, such as Google Hangouts on Air or LiveStream. Use the Live Console Hub for real-time monitoring of attendees, sales data and questions. Integrates with all the major email autoresponders such as GetResponse, AWeber, iContact, and MailChimp. Comes bundled with a number of professionally designed page templates that can be customized with your own brand colors and images. Attendees can sign up with a simple one-click registration. Add a viral sharing feature to your confirmation page, and offer gift incentives for participants who share their registration on social networks. Export the details of “hot leads” who attended your webinar, watched the replay, and are most likely to become paying customers. Push a Call to Action or any other HTML when you are ready to pitch your product. Increase your attendee rate by scheduling email and text notifications that can be integrated with any SMTP service or with Twilio. Choose between a Questions Box and a Live Chat for your webinar page depending on which feature is appropriate for each individual webinar. Integrates with popular payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe which allows you to charge a fee for webinar entry. A one-time payment that doesn’t require yearly renewals, which makes it a very cost-effective choice. The plugin costs $97 for one site, $197 for three sites, or $297 for unlimited sites. Free WordPress Webinar Software: The Ultimate Guide If you’d prefer a free option, the absolute best choice is Google Hangouts on Air, which has recently moved to YouTube Live. It offers all the basic features needed for a webinar including automatic recording and DVR, which means it’s the perfect choice for anyone on a budget. In fact, we recommend that anyone who is interested in making webinars should try this free option first before committing to a paid software. To help you out, we’ve put together the ultimate ten-step guide to adding a Google Hangouts on Air webinar to your WordPress site. NOTE: Setting up a webinar requires a Google AdSense account. If you don’t already have one, a new account can take between 12 hours and 3 days to be approved. Make sure you have plenty of time to set up your account before you plan on broadcasting your first webinar. Step 1: Create a Google Account The first thing we need to do is create a Google account. If you already have a Google account, you can skip this step. To create a Google account, go to the Sign Up page, fill in your personal information and click “Next Step”. Read the Privacy and Terms and click “I Agree”. Google needs to verify you’re a real person, so enter your details, choose text or voice verification and click “Continue”. Enter the verification code you received by text or voice and click “Continue”. Your new Google account is now ready to use. Since August 2016, Google requires anyone who wants to embed live videos to have a Google AdSense account, so the next thing we have to do is sign up for AdSense. Step 2: Sign up for Google AdSense Go to the Google AdSense site and click on the green “Sign Up Now” button. Enter your details, read and accept the Terms and Conditions and click “Create Account”. Enter your personal details and your website address, then complete the verification. Next, you have to paste the AdSense code into your WordPress website. Click “Copy Code”. Open a new browser window and log in to your WordPress site. We need to add the AdSense code into our WordPress site. The method for doing this will be slightly different depending on what theme you’re using. One easy method which is guaranteed to work for all themes is to install a plugin called Insert Headers and Footers. On your Dashboard menu, click “Plugins” and “Add New”. Search for Insert Headers and Footers and click “Install Now”. Click “Activate”, then click “Settings” and “Insert Headers and Footers” in the Dashboard menu. Paste the code into the “Script in Header” section and press “Save”. Go back to the AdSense page, check the confirmation box and click “Done”. Google will review your site and send you an email when they’ve finished. It says it will take up to 3 days, but it will usually be finished in less than 12 hours. Take a break and come back when your confirmation has arrived. Step 3: Create a New Event on YouTube Live The next thing we need to do is create a new event in YouTubeLive, so go to Google, click on the 3×3 app icon in the top right corner of the page and click the link to YouTube. If you’re not automatically signed in, click the “Sign In” button and enter your Google password. Next, click the “My channel” link in the left menu. Enter your name, read the Terms and Conditions and click “Create Channel”. The next thing we need to do is check that YouTube has recognized your AdSense account and enabled embedding, so go to https://www.youtube.com/features. Click “Enable” in the Monetization box. Click the blue “Start” button, read the terms, check the boxes and click “I accept”. Click the blue “Start” button next to step 2, then click “Next” and sign in to your AdSense account. Check your details and click “Accept association”. When you are redirected back to your dashboard, click the blue “Start” button for step 3. You can choose whether or not to monetize all existing and future videos. It won’t affect your ability to embed webinar videos. Click “Save”. Now we need to set up the webinar video. To make a webinar we need to create a live event, so click on the “Video Manager” link. In the left menu, click “Live Streaming”, “Events”, then the blue “New live event” button. We need to verify our YouTube account, so enter your details, get your verification code and enter it on the next screen. Now that we’re verified, lets double check that embedding is enabled. Click “Channel” in the menu on the left. Live streaming and Embed live streams should be Enabled. It doesn’t matter if Monetization says Not enabled. Next, we have to create our webinar event. In the menu on the left, click “Live Streaming” and “Events”, and then click the blue “Schedule a new event” link. Enter the name of your webinar, the date and the start time. If you’re not sure about the best date and time to hold your webinar, have a look at our advice at the end of this article. We want to use Google Hangouts on Air, so make sure you have the Quick type selected. You can also choose whether you want your webinar to be Public, Unlisted or Private. Public events are viewable by anyone, Unlisted events are viewable by anyone who has the link, and Private events are viewable only by people who you personally invite. For most people, Unlisted will probably be the best option. Step 4: Customize Your Event If you want to customize your event further, click on the “Advanced settings” tab. You can select languages, set age restrictions, change recording settings and numerous other things. For a basic webinar, you probably don’t need to change anything. While you’re here, make sure that “Allow embedding” is checked. When you’ve finished, click the blue “Create Event” button. The next thing we want to do is grab the link to the video, so click on the title of your webinar. You should see a grey screen with a countdown timer. Click the “Share” button underneath your video, then click the “Embed” tab. Copy the embed code and keep it safe. We’ll use it a little later. Step 5: Create a New Event Page for Your WordPress Webinar Now we’ve got the video set up, let’s create a new page to display the webinar. For this tutorial, we’re using the standard WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme. Open your WordPress dashboard and click “Pages” then “Add New”. Enter a title for your page Step 6: Embed Your WordPress Webinar We’re going to paste the video code into the page, so make sure you have the “Text” tab selected. Paste the video embed code straight into the page. Click “Preview” to make sure the video is linked. Congratulations! You should have a webinar video ready to broadcast. Step 8: Create a Signup Page If you want to have a successful webinar, you need to know who is going to attend, so let’s create a sign-up page. We’re going to link this sign up page to an email marketing tool. Use the same steps we used before to create a new WordPress page and give it a name. Write a description of your webinar. You can use the “Visual” tab this time. For this tutorial, we’ll make it very simple, but for a real webinar, it’s important to make it as persuasive and informative as possible. Next, we’ll create a form to capture attendee information. Step 9: Add a Form from Your Email Marketing Tool To create a new form, we need to use an email marketing tool. If you don’t already have one, some of the popular choices are MailChimp, Convertkit, and AWeber. For this tutorial, we’re going to sign up for a new MailChimp account. Open a new browser window and go to https://mailchimp.com/. Click the “Sign Up Free” button. Add your details and click “Get Started”. Confirm your email address and fill in your personal information, then navigate to the MailChimp dashboard. To create a form, we first need a list. Click “Create a list”. Fill in your details and click “Save”. Click on the “Signup forms” tab, and click “Embedded forms”. Change the form title to something more appropriate. You can also change the information that will be collected by editing the fields. When you’ve finished, copy all the code from the “Copy/paste onto your site” box. Head back to your sign up page, click the “Text” tab and paste the code below your webinar description. Click “Preview”. You now have a signup page to capture your attendee details! Anytime somebody signs up you’ll get an email alert. What Now? Now that your webinar is ready, you want to make sure your webinar is as successful as possible. Here are some ideas you might want to try. Run a test webinar to help familiarize yourself with the YouTube live controls and make sure you don’t have any technical problems that could ruin your first live webinar. Make sure you have an interesting and useful presentation for your attendees. Audience participation is one of the most powerful aspects of a webinar, so don’t forget to include interactive elements in your presentation. Add a social media plugin such as Click to Tweet to promote and share your webinar. Create a replay page to allow attendees to come back and watch your recorded webinar at any time. YouTube Live automatically saves your webinar, so this is as simple as creating a new WordPress page and linking your saved video. It’s important to choose the right time and day to broadcast your webinar to ensure the maximum possible attendance. Here are some facts and figures from a study of 12,970 webinars held in 2015. Effective promotion of your webinar is key to having a successful webinar. While a large share of registrants signs up in the week leading up to the event, almost a quarter of registrants sign up more than two weeks before. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the best days for sending promotional emails as people will be more receptive. Weekends are the worst time, as people are not thinking about work. Wednesday and Thursday are the best days for holding your webinar, with Tuesday a close second. Friday, Saturday and Sunday draw the lowest audience. Scheduling a time for your webinar is difficult as participants may be located all over the world. The best performing webinars are scheduled to avoid lunchtime and commuting time for the majority of the participants. The average viewing time of a webinar is 57 minutes, so aim for a webinar that runs less than an hour. Having an on-demand webinar allows people who have other commitments or time constraints to attend your event. 33% of people watch the on-demand webinar but not the live one, so if you don’t have an on-demand option you could be missing out on a large part of your audience. Webinars can be a great tool for connecting with potential customers, engaging with current customers, and growing your business. There are a number of great paid options to help you create a WordPress webinar. For those people with budget limitations, it’s relatively easy to set up your own free and fully functional webinar without needing any specific technical knowledge. THERE’S MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM. READ MORE ON HOW TO UTILIZE VIDEO CONTENT: WORDPRESS AND VIDEO: TIPS AND BEST PRACTICES TO DO IT RIGHT
We’re currently updating this piece to be more accurate. In the mean time, check out this piece for current best practices from our Docs team. Have you ever updated a plugin on your WordPress site and had the screen go white? You didn’t change any code, but the site goes pear-shaped right in front of you, all from one little plugin. Panicked, you try a few things and manage to get it back online, only to see a distorted layout. Not long after that, site visitors start sharing witty commentary about their experience and depending on the nature of your site, you take a hit in the revenue department. It happens. Fortunately, website owners can completely avoid situations like this by testing updates and changes on a WordPress staging site. Also referred to as a development or testing site, a WordPress staging site is an offline clone of your website. You can use this duplicate site to perform testing and make changes in an environment hidden from visitors. Working in a staging site eliminates any downtime that results from plugin malfunctions, page crashes or broken code. Reasons to Create a WordPress Staging Site A staging site is often used while building a new website, but it can also come in handy when updating and improving an existing site. By working in a staging environment, you ensure that the experience of your visitors isn’t disturbed as you make edits. The original site continues to work normally until a decision is made to push those changes live. Other benefits of using a WordPress staging site include: It allows you to troubleshoot plugin issues without spreading the problem to your live site Having a staging site eliminates the negative impact of a crashed website on conversion and sales Website owners are empowered to thoroughly test every element at their own pace without the time constraint of having the actual site in maintenance mode Despite the many benefits of using a WordPress staging site, you won’t have much leverage unless you know how to set one up. So, let’s move forward and learn to develop a WordPress staging site. Setting Up a WordPress Staging Environment There are many options for creating a WordPress staging site, and we’re going to explore a few of the more popular choices below. This way, you can assess the pros and cons of each and pick the one that best suits your needs. 1. Create a WordPress Staging Site Using Your Web Host Most managed WordPress hosts offer one-click staging environments or command-line tools as part of their packages. The exact steps to set up a staging environment may vary slightly across hosts, but the process is largely similar. Pagely, for instance, offers a command line tool named “Pagely Sync” that enables you to easily clone your website. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to create a staging site on Pagely. Use the Atomic core dashboard to log in to your Pagely account. Select “Deploy New App” to open a staging site. Choose a name for the staging site. Anything along the lines of staging.mywebsite.com should work fine. The information for the app can be accessed by visiting “Sites > All Sites,” find your new app and click “App Details.” The temporary Pagely URL that’s presented is your new staging website. Pagely’s current staging set up can sync databases and files, with the additional capability to neglect files and/or tables. It also has the ability to perform plain site renaming, but the URLs don’t undergo database rewriting since that can cause issues. Pagely’s staging feature is available to users on its VPS and Enterprise plans. Creating a demo site on Pagely is simple and straightforward, making it easy for even the most non-technical people to create a staging environment. Your host may or may not have this option, so check with support – and tell ’em Pagely sent ya. 😉 2. Build a WordPress Staging Site Manually A more hands-on approach involves creating a WordPress staging website manually. Beginners are likely to find this option challenging, and it’s best suited for advanced WordPress users with a knowledge of MySQL database operations. The benefit of adopting this approach is that it gives you total control over the staging setup. Here’s how to create a WordPress staging site manually: Create a sub-domain on the main domain by logging into your cPanel or another control panel. A sub-domain enables website owners to run their staging site in a separate folder, which leaves the main database and its contents unaffected. Click “sub-domains” under the “domains” section. Enter a name for your sub-domain, then use the drop-down menu to select your actual domain. When you do so, the “document root” text box inside the cPanel should fill in automatically and show a location based on your sub-domain. It will be something like public_html/staging. Click “Create” once you’ve finished the previous steps. It should proceed, and display the sub-domain in a table. It can also be verified through a web browser and should appear like this: The next step is to create a dedicated FTP account for the staging site. It will only provide access to the staging environment to secure against accidental modifications to the live site. Go to “FTP Account” in cPanel and complete the fields in the “Add FTP Account” section. The “Directory” should be similar to the directory you selected while creating your sub-domain. Select “Create FTP Account” to create a brand new account. This will only provide access to the specified directory and not the entire server. After the sub-domain has been created, copy the data from the actual site to the staging one. To do so, go to cPanel and log into “phpMyAdmin” and choose the database of the live site. Click “Operations” in the menu bar after doing so. Search for the text box named “Copy Database To” and enter the staging database’s name in it. If you didn’t create a database for your staging website, check “CREATE DATABASE before copying” and name it to something like sample_staging. Both the data and structure needs to be copied and no settings should be changed. Select “Go” to run the duplicate. After the copying of the database finishes, select it from the left of the sidebar. Then the newly copied database will be launched by phpMYAdmin. Afterwards, click “SQL” tab in the phpMYAdmin menu bar. 10. All the references on your actual site should be copied to the staging site to ensure everything is in order. Run these SQL queries next: First query: UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = REPLACE(option_value, ‘ORIGINAL_URL’, ‘NEW_URL’); Second query: UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = REPLACE(meta_value, ‘ORIGINAL_URL’, ‘NEW_URL’); Third query: UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE(guid, ‘ORIGINAL_URL’, ‘NEW_URL’); Fourth query: UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, ‘ORIGINAL_URL’, ‘NEW_URL’); These queries should replace the following values as you enter them in the SQL query box: NEW_URL: the new URL, the one created by your staging site earlier, needs to be filled. Write http:// before the URL. ORIGINAL_URL: this is the URL of the original site. It can be found through the WordPress Admin area by going to Settings > General > WordPress Address (the URL). Wp_: Replace wp_ with any custom prefix present on database tables. Click “Go” to start queries and wait for the confirmation message saying that the process is complete. Once your database is copied, you can proceed with copying things like themes and plugins. Go to WordPress.org and download a new copy of the WordPress software, and upload its contents to the staging environment without running WordPress install. After WordPress is uploaded, you can start copying plugins, themes, and media files. These are the folders that have to be copied: Wp-content/plugins Wp-content/themes Wp-content/uploads If you haven’t stored a lot of content in these folders, you can also use your FTP client to download them from your actual website and upload them in staging. For folders with a larger amount of content, use the native file manager provided by cPanel because it copies folders on the server directly. These folders need to be copied to the staging folder i.e. /public_html/staging/wp-content/. Once all that is done, you can connect the WordPress staging installation to the database you copied before. Open the staging environment, through the sub-domain created earlier. If the staging directory is missing a wp-config.php file, your database connection details may be asked for in order to create one. But if there’s one already there, edit it and put in the new staging database connection info. WordPress should then connect to the staging database, detect WordPress was successfully installed, and ask you to log in. The login credentials will be the same as on your actual website. You will now have a staging site that’s independent from your live website for testing purposes. 3. Use a Plugin to Develop a WordPress Staging Site The plugin approach is the easiest one among all options. Through the WordPress admin area, you can install a staging plugin that handles the process of copying the database between sites. Here are three recommended plugins: All-in-One WP Migration The All-In-One WP Migration plugin is simple to use and it allows you to export a duplicate copy of your site, which is required for testing. Install this plugin and go to “All-In-One WP Migration” > “Export” from the admin area. Choose “find and replace” if you want to modify anything, like the name you want to use for the staging website. You can also take out spam comments to shrink export size. After saving the export files, import them to the new installation on the sub-domain. The plugin first needs to be installed on the import site, which can be done by choosing “All-In-One WP Migration” > “Import” in the admin area of the staging site. The export file can be dragged-and-dropped into the import area. After the import completes, use the original site’s credentials to log in, and click “Save” twice to update permalinks. You’ll now have a staging environment at your disposal. WP Staging WP Staging‘s rating indicates that its a go-to plugin for setting up a staging site. Search for it through the admin area and install it. Next, go to “Plugins” > “Staging” > “Create New Staging Site” to begin. Give a name to your staging site and a sub-directory will be created for it under your current WordPress website. Agree to the scan of database tables and files and configure any advanced option. Select “Start Cloning” and wait for the process to complete. After completion, you can click the button and use the admin credentials that you used on the original website to log into the staging version of it. Using WP Staging is one of the fastest routes you can take to create a WordPress staging website. WP Stagecoach Short on time and looking for a plugin that allows you to create a staging site within minutes? Look no further than WP Stagecoach. Install it and then click “WP Stagecoach” from the admin area of your WordPress website to set a URL for the staging site. You may also be asked to create a password. Then click “Ride the Stagecoach” to build the staging environment, which you can access using the same username and password that you use for your original website. WP Stagecoach also enables you to pick which changes to import on the staging site; you can import some or all of your database changes. There is also an option to password-protect the staging area. SSL is activated on every staging site. In addition, WP Stagecoach runs the site on its own server. Although this saves you the hassle of hosting the staging area on your site, it also means you get a different environment than the live site, which can sometimes cause technical difficulties. Conclusion The thought of creating a WordPress staging website can be stressful for many website owners, but there are many options that you can experiment with based on your tech level. If you want to ensure that changes and updates don’t impact your live website, it’s important to conduct all of your testing in a private, offline environment. What’s your preferred option for creating a WordPress staging website?
