How To Make Changes To Wordpress Site Without Publishing

Work on your WordPress site without going live

And then, you want to brand some changes to your WordPress site without anyone else seeing?
Perhaps it's a new site you're getting ready to launch, or perchance you're giving a facelift to an existing site. How tin can you piece of work on your WordPress site without publishing the changes for the world to run into?

You take a few options depending on your specific situation.

Use a "Coming Shortly" style plugin

One approach is to put up a temporary splash page or landing folio which displays a "coming shortly" or "maintenance fashion" style message. This can exist done easily with a plugin; the one I'd recommend is Coming Soon by SeedProd. Whatsoever normal visitor who tries to access your site will run across the custom bulletin you create and nada else. You, as the administrator, will exist able to meet the site as normal while logged in. The Coming Soon plugin gives yous ample control over the splash page, where you tin can add together text, images, a logo, groundwork epitome etc.

Pros

You can make all kinds of changes – content, design etc – without anyone seeing.
Easy to implement

Cons

If your site is live and receiving traffic, this would provide a poor user feel since they can't access any pages, just the coming soon bulletin.

This method volition work all-time if your site is new, doesn't receive much traffic, or you lot just need to take it offline for a short period of fourth dimension.

Work Locally

If you need to keep a site fully accessible to the public, simply you lot need to make pregnant and disruptive changes, making a local development version of the site would be a dandy style to go. My favorite tool for this is DesktopServer. Check out this tutorial to see how you can copy your live site to your local computer. Since all work is then carried out on the local version, the live site will remain undisturbed.

Pros

Your current will remain live and attainable to all visitors
Once you've gone to the try of copying your live site, you now have a testing version you tin use for the time to come.

Cons

It takes some work to copy your site locally and then push the changes back to the production site.
It's possible that your local ready will not 100% replicate your live hosting surround and in some cases that could cause unexpected behaviour. e.g. different versions of PHP, Apache vs. NGINX etc

Apply a subdomain or other testing domain

This is very like to the concept of making a local development version, except that instead of making the copy locally, information technology will be a alive site on the net

Pros

In some cases, moving files between folders on the aforementioned server is easier than back and forth betwixt local and live.
Your server environment for both the live and development version would be the same.

Cons

You have to either delete information technology afterwards, or maintain it as you would a normal site, since it's accessible via the cyberspace, therefore susceptible to hackers etc

Utilise the staging feature of your webhost

Some webhosts provide the awesome feature of one-click staging environments. At the click of a button, they re-create your website to a special staging URL where yous tin make your changes. It's an automatic equivalent to the previous choice, merely much easier. Often, there will too be an easy way to push the changes you lot made, back to your live site.
Some webhosts that provide this feature are: FlyWheel, WP Engine, and Siteground.

Pros

Very like shooting fish in a barrel to implement

Cons

Non all hosts provide this pick

Use a theme switching plugin

If the chief task y'all need to do is activate and work on a different theme behind the scenes, and then using a plugin like Theme Switcha could be the way to go. It allows you to go along one theme agile for regular site visitors, only enable a different one for admin users, and then that y'all can configure the new one behind the scenes until yous're ready to make the switch.

Pros