Please note, this article assumes you have cPanel access - not all BigScoots services do. If you do not have cPanel, or if you have any trouble following this guide what so ever, please simply open a ticket and we'll be more than happy to create one for you.

As a start, it would be advisable to create a subdomain for the staging environment. You can do this from your cPanel interface -> Domains

You can feel free to create your subdomain here, we will use staging.DOMAIN.com ( substitute DOMAIN.com with your domain name). Please do check the subdomain name, the folder on to which the files will be setup and the subdomain entry there.

As long as you are using the Bigscoots Nameservers, the DNS entry for the subdomain will be added automatically. If you don't please make sure to add the DNS entry in your current DNS provider, pointing to your shared server IP address.

Now let's begin with the Staging site creation

 3. On the top-right of the screen, click on the file folder icon as shown below. It will show all Softaculous installations.

4. You will see every site that is in Softaculous as shown in the below image.
​

5. A lot of times the WordPress sites weren't created originally with softaculous, but there is now an auto-detect option to import your existing site to the Softaculous. If the site is already present, you can skip this part.
      i.  Go back to the software page and you will see several tabs as shown below.

      ii. Click the "Import" tab which will open a new page and you will see two sections - "From this Server" and "From Remote Server". Since we are going to import the site within the cPanel account, we will be selecting the tab "From this Server". 

      iii. Then write the name of the directory where the site is installed manually or by other auto installer and then click on "Import". This will lead to a screen showing the imported site details as shown below.

When you go back (to Step 3) by click the file folder icon (on the top-right of the screen, "All installations"), it will show all the sites including the one we have imported.

6. Now choose the site for which you want to create a development site and click on the Create Staging icon as shown in the screenshot below.
​

7. This will lead to a Staging page with the current installation details and a form to fill in the details for the development site. Select the Staging subdomain URL in the "Choose installation URL"

Select the "Disable Search Engine Visibility" in order to avoid any staging site indexing.

You will see a message stating “Congratulations, the staging was created successfully.” upon the creation of the development site. You can log in to the WordPress admin panel with the same credentials as used for the live site and you can use this development site installation to test the updates or any other changes you may want to test.