If you ever want to begin creating a new site WITHOUT touching your production (live) site or going to make major alterations to your site but need to do so without touching the current site, you can set up a staging site. You can either start fresh or take a clone of your current site and use the site as a basis and do the changes before moving the site into production mode.
In cPanel, you need to first create the domain i.e dev.domainname.com.au.
To set up a new domain, please visit our article Creating a new Addon domain
If you maintain your DNS records through an external DNS provider such as cloudflare or another provider, you will need to setup a new DNS A record to point to the Shared IP address on the server. The IP address can be found by logging into the cpanel account and looking under the "General Information" box and Shared IP Address.
The record that needs to be set up is an A Record. The TTL can be set to the default. The value should be set to the Shared IP address of the server.
If we maintain your DNS records, you don't need to do anything. The DNS record is already created with you added the new addon domain.
Once the A record has been created, you can test to see if the new staging domain is working by going to https://www.whatsmydns.net/
You can now start building your site by installing a content management system (such as WordPress) or uploading your web files, take a clone of your current site.
If you are wanting to setup WordPress from scratch, we recommend using Softaculous (within cPanel) as this is a very simple way in setting up a CMS and moving the site into production mode when you are ready. Softaculous also alows you to take clone of othe CMS sites (installed within the same cPanel account) and login to the management dashboard.
To use softaculous to install wordpress, please visit this guide.
To access the folder to upload files via FTP - Check this guide out
After you have created a DNS record, you can generate a SSL certificate. To generate a SSL certificate, please go to the SSL/TLS Status in the Security Tab in cPanel
Click on Run AutoSSL button to generate and install a SSL Certificate.
Please note:
The SSL certificate will only be set up correctly if the DNS record is pointing to the correct IP address. If the DNS record is not setup, the certificate will not be created.
After setting up the staging site, you can now redesign your site without touching the live site.
