How To Work On A Wordpress Site Without Publishing. FAQs.

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How to work on a WordPress site without publishing.

Don’t want to publish your WordPress site or content until you have everything just right? Relax, you don’t have to! There are various ways to work on a WordPress site without publishing, these include:

Using the Duplicate Post plugin.
Use an “Under Construction” plugin.
Use a Coming Soon plugin.
Use a theme switching plugin.
Create a local environment
Use a subdomain or other testing domain.
Use a staging site.
Use the Revisionize plugin.

In this post, I am going to go over more of the easier ways to work on a WordPress site without publishing along with listing some helpful tools to make the job even easier.

There are several ways in fact depending on what areas of your WordPress site you want to work on without publishing those changes out on the web until you’re ready.

Use a Coming Soon or an Under Construction plugin.

These plugins are great if you want to take your website offline to make some temporary changes to it.

Whether that’s to the content braven sitewide. This plug in of course is best used with new websites that don’t have a lot of traffic yet.

However, I don’t see any problems with using this plugin for sites that have decent amounts of traffic.

Some of the plugins (these plugins are listed below) will even allow you to put a short message on the coming soon under construction page that can explain to your visitors the situation, so they don’t just think you’ve abandoned them.

Theme switching plugin.

A theme switching plugin is great only if you are looking to change the theme while your WordPress website is still online with its old theme.

For other than switching themes, a theme switching plugin won’t do you much good.

Here are two great theme switching plugins:

Create a local working environment.

There are a few ways you can create a local working environment. In fact, you can set up an entire WordPress site before you even get it online.

Here is a post that will go into more details on how you can do just that: “Can I build a WordPress site without hosting? You bet you can!”

Get a subdomain or testing domain.

This is very similar to creating a local environment, except that instead of making a copy of your website locally on your computer through the software solutions listed above, this version of your website will be live on the internet.

However, it will be under a different domain or “subdomain” to be exact.

Here’s an example: If wanted to work on wpwebsitetools.com before putting it live on the internet or even while live on the internet, I could simple set up a subdomain which looks similar to it but under a different URL like: “testwpwebsitetools.com” instead of wpwebsitetools.com, and work on it there.

Try a staging environment. Check for staging features with your Web Host.

Many hosting plans have a feature that allows you to create a “staging environment”.

This means that with just a few clicks you can copy your website to a subdomain or even into a draft version of your current domain which will allow you to make the changes you need without publishing them out on the internet.

If you don’t like the changes, no worries.

Simply press delete and continue. When you’re satisfied you can upload those changes to your current website.

This is an easier way to work on your WordPress site without publishing than actually going out and setting up a “subdomain”, if you choose to work in a “draft” mode.

I know SiteGround has a staging environment feature for their users.

How to save changes on WordPress without publishing.

To save changes to pages and post in WordPress without publishing you can simply leave them in “Draft” mode.

This will let you work on them, see how they appear without publishing them by clicking “Preview” until you are satisfied with the final draft.

How do I share a WordPress site without publishing it?

The easiest way would simply be to make your WordPress website “Private”.

The best way to make your entire website “Private” would be through the use of this plugin: My Private Site. Your site will only be accessible to those you give a link and a password to.

Can I run a website without hosting?

The answer here would be no. Or at least, not normally anyway. In basic terms, hosting is simply a server which allows people to connect and download files from your website.

Now I am not saying that you could never run a fully optimised website off your own machine, but this would be a very impractical means of doing so.

For example, if someone wanted to upload a large file which was 2MB in size to your website account, it could take them anywhere from 3-5 minutes just to transfer the file.

This is because network speeds are not always consistent and you would have to allow for these time delays. In this way, running a website would become very time consuming and would be too much work for the amount of value one might get from it.

By being able to run a website off your computer you can quickly see how impractical it is as a means of managing a blog or other type of content which you wish to share with the world.

Whereas within a hosting service there are many features that vary with each different account type. But most notable of these would be loading speeds, storage space and bandwidth.

In basic terms, bandwidth is how much data can be moved out or into your hosting account per month.

This would be most noticeable with your bandwidth being used up as people visit and view website content.

Storage space is simply how much data can be stored within the hosting account. In most cases, storage would only really come into play with large files such as audio or video media.

However, you can also use this for many other things such as backups, document repositories or large files that are periodically accessed.

So running a website with hosting just makes much more sense, than running a website off your own computer without hosting.

How do I put my WordPress site under construction?

The easiest way to do this would be through a plugin. Put your site under construction with one of the plugins below:

These plugins let you easily put a WordPress website under construction.

Visitors will see a friendly message while they wait for the site to be built, and when it’s done they will get a notification letting them know that it’s ready.

How to work on a WordPress site without publishing. Conclusions.

The best way to work on your WordPress site without publishing is by using the built-in Editor tool that comes with WordPress.

The best and easiest way, if you want to continue working on a post or page is to simply save it as a “Draft”.

There are other ways to work on your WordPress website without publishing mentioned in this post.

You can work on editing or building new content, changing themes, adding plugins, etc., all without having to publish anything live. It’s a great time saver!

Give these a try today and see if you like these methods of working on your site before publishing.