This is not an official post from SiteGround. However, we use SiteGround for all of our own websites and recommend it to our clients at Chris McElroy SEO Agency. In addition to having a lot of experience setting up websites on SiteGround, we passed this guide onto them before publishing to make sure we haven’t missed anything or made any mistakes. So, this should help anyone setting up a staging ground for a new website or an existing website for editing.
This article assumes you already have a SiteGround Hosting Account. If you don’t, we highly recommend them. NGINX with lightning fast PHP, Dynamic Cache, Memcache, Free CDN, Unlimited Free Email Accounts, a much better dashboard than CPanel or other hosting dashboards, Force HTTPS at the server level, log into your WP dashboard from inside the control panel, and more, but the most important feature for us at any hosting company… Fantastic Customer Service and Support.
Okay, now let’s get to setting up that staging ground for your new website.
Part 1 Setting Up A Staging Ground Getting Started
- Log in to SiteGround.
- Go to the Websites tab.
- Click New Website.
- Choose Migrate or New Site select Start New Website.
- Select WordPress as the installation type.
- Enter a username and password for the new WordPress admin. Write both down immediately. You’ll need them later.
- Click Continue.
- When asked about extras or services, Choose the services you want or click “No, thank you” on both screens. Click Finish.
- Wait for SiteGround to finish creating the site.
- When complete, it will show you the staging site address (URL).
- Write it down along with the username and password you just created.
Shameless Plug 1: If you prefer someone else to set everything up and maintain your website for you, daily updates and backups for all plugins and themes, troubleshooting and even making small changes for you, you can read more about our WordPress Maintenance Services here.
Part 2 Staging Ground Setup After The Website Has Been Created
- In the Websites view, locate the new site.
- The staging URL will appear in the dropdown at the top left (for example, username703.sg-host.com/). If you already changed your nameservers, it will just be the domain name.
- CDN is not auto-installed. We don’t recommend enabling it on staging while developing the website.
- Open Speed > Caching from the left-hand menu.
- Turn NGINX Direct Delivery Off.
- Make sure Memcached Off.
- In the left menu, go to Security > HTTPS Enforce and toggle it On. (The first time you go to WordPress > Install and Manage > Site Admin, it may tell you the site is not secure. Look in the address bar. It likely says http rather than https. Just add the s and hit enter. It should get you right in. Usually only happens the first time.)
- Open File Manager (under Site Tools > Site > File Manager).
- In the site’s root folder, (public_html) create a new text file named robots.txt. (Just open Notepad on your PC. Add the following single line exactly: ( User-agent: * Disallow: / ) Without the parenthesis. (No vertical bar or additional characters.) Save the file.
- Upload it to the root folder. (This is one of the steps that makes sure your site won’t get crawled until you are ready to go live with your website.)
Important Note: Save this part ofn the post. When you are ready to go live, go back through the list and make sure to turn everything back on and change your robots.txt to say this instead…
User-agent: *
Allow: / )
The screenshots below should help assure you are in the right place.
Part 3 Getting Into Your WordPress Admin The 1st Time: HTTP vs HTTPS
In the sidebar, go to WordPress > Install and Manage.
- Reminder: The first time you do this, your browser may show a warning: > “[your-site].sg-host.com doesn’t support a secure connection with HTTPS.”
- This is normal for a new staging environment before the SSL certificate fully applies.
- In the address bar, manually add an “s” after http so the URL begins with https://, then press Enter.
- Example: http://chrism703.sg-host.com/wp-admin > https://chrism703.sg-host.com/wp-admin
- If it redirects you to the home page instead of the dashboard, manually add /wp-admin/
to the end of the staging domain. - If you see the admin bar at the top of the page that says “My WordPress”, click it to enter the dashboard.
- If you see the SiteGround WordPress Starter wizard, you can use that, but this guide is for setting up the staging ground yourself where you have more control.
- Click “Exit Wizard” in the bottom-left corner. You’ll be inside the standard WordPress dashboard.
- The site will now remember the HTTPS version the next time you log in through SiteGround.
Part 4 Before You Build Anything WordPress Settings Configuration
Once you’re in the WordPress dashboard:
Go to Settings > General
Set the Site Title to the name of the site you’ll be building. Add anything in the Tagline field. This is just to confirm that taglines display correctly as you work. Don’t worry about accuracy here; it will be changed later.
Go to Settings > Reading
Check “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” Choose static page if you’re building a site, not just a blog. It will likely have one as the default. Leave it for now. That will be handled later once the site design is in place.
Go to Settings > Discussion
Uncheck everything. (This disables comments, pingbacks, and notifications and keeps staging clean.)
Go to Settings > Media
Update the size values to:
Thumbnail: 400 x 400
Medium: 1200 x 1200
Large: 2048 x 2048 Save changes. (Those are my defaults.Your mileage may vary. If you plan a lot of small thumbnails, change it accordingly.)
Go to Settings > Permalinks
If the site will have a blog, set the structure to: /%category%/%postname%/ If the site will not have a blog, set it to: /%postname%/
Save changes. (Again, these are my own defaults because I use categories in my blogs. Whatever you do here, don’t add dates unless you have a good reason to, like a news blog. But put thought into this because it will be the URL structure for your whole website going forward.)
That completes the initial WordPress settings configuration. The environment is now properly isolated from search indexing, clean of comments, and ready for plugin installation.
Shameless Plug 2: If you would like us to set it up for you for a very reasonable price, contact us here.
Part 5 Before Installing New Plugins Clean Up & Configure What's Already There
In the left side menu, Go to Plugins > Installed Plugins.
Deactivate and delete the plugin SiteGround Central. It’s only used for onboarding and adds unnecessary clutter.
Locate Speed Optimizer. Deactivate it for now. Leave it installed for later reactivation during testing or before launch.
Look for Security Optimizer and leave this or make it active. Leaving it active during development doesn’t interfere with anything and it keeps the basic firewall and login protections running while the site is under development.
Once these are done, the plugin list is clean and ready for your standard stack to be installed next.
Before you start adding plugins, remember…
You already have a security plugin that could interfere with other security plugins, so choose wisely.
You already have a caching plugin and it also has an image optimizer built in as well as minify javascript, CSS and HTML. Adding other plugins that do the same thing can cause conflicts. So again, choose wisely.
These 2 plugins were designed specifically to work with the server setup at SiteGround. We strongly recommend using them instead of adding more plugins not built specifically for this host.
What About Other Plugins? What Do You Recommend?
AT Chris McElroy SEO Agency, we try to keep a standard stack for plugins, however, different clients have different needs and if you ask several developers about their favorite plugin for something, you get a lot of different answers based on their own experience and personal preferences, but we’ll share some of our go to plugins below.
The key to not having problems with plugins is discipline. “That plugin looks really cool!” is not a valid reason for installing a plugin. And only use plugins that are trusted by a lot of developers. Go to WordPress.org and choose from there, not some TikTok, Instagram or YouTube video or a tweet.
More Plugins = More chances of security problems and conflicts.
Backup Plugins & Policy
SiteGround already does daily backups, so you do not have to have a backup plugin active after your site is live. You can choose to, but SiteGround gives you access to the backups on the server so you don’t have to contact support like other hosts. You can easily restore from there.
However, during development, you should use a backup plugin to save your progress. Here’s what we use.
The Paranoia is Real. And if you have ever lost a lot of work because of not backing something up, you’d be paranoid too. We install 2 backup plugins because each uses a different backup method. WPVivid & Updraft Plus. We use WPVivid for saves like at the end of the day and download a copy to our hard drive. We use Updraft for saving progress during the day.
Go to Plugins > Add New.
In the search bar, for each plugin type WPVivid and next Updraft. Install them and wait for it to finish. Go ahead and activate both during development.
WPVivid’s default settings are fine. There’s no need to adjust anything. With Updraft, you might want to go to advanced settings and set the max number of backups to retain on the server to no more than 5. We do 3. If you back up often, a high number of backups would pile up on the server.
Our method is to immediately do a backup with each before starting to develop a site. Then download them to our PC. The starting points.
Plugin Installation – Our Standard Stack, not including anything the specific client might need. I’m not including WooCommerce sites in this part. That’s a whole other stack.
What we use:
1. SVG Support – Install and activate. No settings changes are needed. It just allows you to upload svgs like inline images and logos, etc.
2. SEOPress & SEOPress Pro. Of course everyone has their favorites and SEO plugins don’t really do SEO. They are just tools an SEO professional can utilize for alerts and saving time when it comes to managing 404s, meta tags, schema, etc. Just installing an SEO plugin will not affect your rankings at all. We choose SEOPress Pro because at around $60 per year, it’s lightweight, makes adding schema markup painless, and makes handling 404s and redirects flawless and quick.
3. Google Sitekit. This one is not something we always add. Some clients want their stats in the dashboard and if they request it, we explain that it can affect site speed, but we leave that tradeoff for the client to decide.
4. Microsoft Clarity. Another one not always used. However, if you have Bing Places set up and you want to see videos of how users interact with your pages, it’s free and works very well. For conversion rate optimization, being able to see what people read, what they click on, if they stopped before finishing a form, etc. can really help if you know how to act on that information. Again, this one can slow down your website. So choose wisely. We like to use it for awhile after development to gather info to make some quick adjustments, then once the site is performing well, we can always disable it. Clients love seeing these videos and it gives you a chance to confirm your initial instincts about conversions.
5. Flying Scripts: Delay JavaScript to boost speed by loading scripts only when needed, reducing render-blocking for faster loading and a smoother user experience.
That’s it as far as a standard stack for us. Each website has unique needs and we might add a couple of plugins for specific tasks, but less is more when it comes to plugins and conflict avoidance.
Page builders
Asking advice about which page builder to use or if you should use one at all is very subjective. And there are a lot of variables to consider rather than having just one set policy.
Examples: Your client’s website was already built with a specific page builder? Do you stick with that or change it? What purpose does the website have? eCommerce? Brochure? Large corporate site? A news site with a lot of traffic?
Custom coding is necessary for certain sites. Other sites, especially for clients with smaller budgets, site builders can be the best option.
Then it comes down to which builder. And just like SEO plugins, everyone has their own opinion on which one is best based on their own experiences, skill level and preferences. There is no one right answer no matter what anyone says. So I won’t recommend my favorite here.
We Invite You To Contribute To This Guide
There is no one-size-fits-all way to do things. That’s why it is advised to hire professionals. We know what to do when something doesn’t go according to plan. 100 people can follow a step-by-step guide and have everything go according to plan and that 101st person have 10 problems because of their unique circumstances. Knowing what to do in those situations is the reason to hire someone to do it for you.
And, this guide is not the definitive, ultimate, authoritative how to article ever written. We’re just sharing how we do it and it works for us. We want to shop you the care we take with installations and help you make the decision as to whether you think you can handle it on your own or not before you spend your valuable time on it.
Another guide might explain it differently or do things in another order. It doesn’t mean they are wrong or we are right. It just means that developers have their own methods and styles based on what works for them and their own past experience.
For that reason, we would love for others to give some feedback, alternate methods for some of the steps, or suggest an addition to this guide. If we add your suggestion to the guide, we’ll even give you credit and a link to your website.
Shameless Plug 3: We offer Managed WordPress Hosting and it isn’t what Hostgator, WPEngine and others call Managed WordPress Hosting. We actually manage it. We do all of the updates, security scanning, backups, troubleshooting, and even make minor changes or tweaks you request. You call us for support, not the hosting company. So our plans are not as cheap, however you can spend as little as about $2.66 per day, you can have peace of mind that your website is in good hands, safe and secure.
