Keep A Test Site Of Your WordPress Blog

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If you are running a blog, and mostly like you are, then you should always keep a test site of your blog. This test site will serve the very important purpose of testing changes that you might be interested in making.

Every now and then we come across cool functionalities that are available on different blogs. More often then not, you are inclined to incorporate these cool features in your blog. If you have any experience on developing websites, you know that implementing even little features may not be very straight-forward. There are very often considerable hurdles and incompatibilities that create all sorts of problem.

If you start implementing changes to the live production version of your site, chances are that your visitors will see that happening live, assuming that you have considerable traffic. If during the process of implementing that little feature you are dying for, actually turns bad, and breaks your site, it may take you even longer to fix the issue that arise from installing the feature. The obvious solution to all of these problems is to keep a test blog site and always make your changes at the test site first.

However there are some precautions that you need to take while creating your test site.

Avoid Confusion

When working with your test site, that must sits at the same host as your production version, you have to make sure that you always know which site you are working on. Since the test site must be as similar to the production version, there are chances that you my mistakenly work on the wrong version of the site. You may do a few things to avoid this. First is that from WordPress options you should keep the name of the blog markedly different then the live version. Secondly, keeping a custom login box may help you recognizing which version of the site you are logging to.

Use Entirely Different Database And Path Name

While installing the test site, the database name, table prefix and the directory where you install the test version should be entirely different. This will minimize the possibility of messing up with the original install.

Keep Search Engines Away

Yes. This will be the one point you don’t want to be indexed by the search engine. To keep Search Engines away from your test install place a robots.txt file in your test install where you disallow all search engines from entering this restricted area. Do not link to the test install from your original blog. There is an option in the installation regarding this as well, that says something like this “I want my blog to appear in Search Engines”. Make sure you uncheck that option at the time of installation. There are some very good tips on Creating a n Ultimate robots.txt file and Creating a robots.txt.

Disable Pings

When you publish a post in your blog, WordPress automatically pings major blog crawlers, and tells them that you have new contents. You don’t want this to happen with the test site. You don’t want people coming in just by chance from Technorati and seeing your test blog. It is a good idea to stop that happening for your posts in the test blog and just disable these pings on your test version.

To do this, go to Options-Writing-Update Services and remove all entries from there.

The downside of keeping your test site is addition overhead you may have. But remember, if you are running any serious blog, it should always be stable. Keeping a test blog makes that job easy.

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