Subdomains for development

A normal best practice for any software development is to use a development environment rather than doing development straight into a production environment. Minor updates to a WordPress environment can be made easily without creating a development environment, but more major development should be done within a development environment, before being migrated across to production.

Many web hosting contracts enable clients to create subdomains as part of the hosting contract. You can also install an independent installation of WordPress into that subdomain environment. So that is a free way of creating a development environment. Following are the steps used for that process.

Creating the development environment

1. Log into your hosting provider’s cPanel, find the Domains section and add a subdomain
2. Go to the software installer in cPanel and install WordPress
3. If your domain is with a different domain name provider (e.g. Cloudflare) then log into that provider, go to the settings for the domain, and add a DNS A record for the subdomain
4. Log into the subdomain as the WP administrator and setup the plugins, and then do the development project. If you are making changes to the existing environment then you might choose to restore the top-level domain to the subdomain and then build on that. Alternatively you may need to build from scratch.