A number of hosting providers using cPanel™ also bundle Softaculous™ software installer. Softaculous™, if you are not familiar with it, is a great easy to use software installer for many open source applications. It not only makes installing applications easy and quick it also makes managing them easy as well.
One feature that I find to be very useful is the ‘one click’ staging for WordPress installs. It allows for quick and easy staging of a live WordPress website so you can test plugin installations, updates, new code, etc. After things are running smooth you can then do a ‘one click’ push to live site. This feature is also great for showing a client interactive changes to a live site with little trouble.
There is however a small glitch or issue when it comes to implementing the staging feature if you are also using cPanels™ Domain force redirect to https. While working on a WordPress website for bestdentureclinic.com the other day I ran into this problem.
If you have domain redirect enabled and you do a staging it will redirect your browser to the live site and you will be ‘blocked’ out of your staging area. Tracking this down can be a bit elusive so I want to mention this issue and potentially save someone a lot of time trying to figure out why their WordPress site keeps redirecting to live site when they create a staging area and try to login. After looking into WordPress plugins, .htaccess, and other areas I finally remembered the cPanel™ redirect option.
It’s a simple fix of course. In cPanels™ just go to Domains >> Domains and disable force https redirect. Once you are done with the staging you can re-enable.
