Introducing WP Remote’s PHP Switcher for Staging Sites

Spending hours maintaining client sites?

WP Remote will streamline your WordPress maintenance process and save you at least 4 hours per site every week.

Staging site php version change feature image

Staging sites are a safety net for critical WordPress maintenance. Testing updates, installing a new plugin, or trying out a new design: all things that are made 100% better by first running it off a live site. 

To test with confidence though, the staging site must be as close to the live site as possible. You should be able to tweak settings to get the test conditions perfect every time. 

Perhaps you want to ensure a certain plugin works well with a new PHP version. Maybe you want to downgrade the PHP version for some reason and see if that affects the site. Your web host will give you a single staging site and is unlikely to let you change PHP versions. So you’re stuck.

With WP Remote, you’re unstuck. When you set up a WP Remote staging site, choose the PHP version you want. Go up a version, down a version, or keep it the same. The choice is completely yours.

Safely test PHP updates

PHP is constantly improving, and that’s a good thing! However, changes to the code structure can bring about unexpected (and unwanted) changes. 

Instead, before updating PHP on your live site, set up a staging site on WP Remote first. Even though the staging site is set up with the same PHP version as your site, you can now change it easily to test the latest version.

Staging site PHP version change

This is an especially boon if you have to update across many PHP versions. Instead of creating a new staging site for each version, just change the setting on the existing one. It is a quick yet simple way to make the testing process much less painful. 

This easy process saves you from the hassle of recreating (and managing) multiple staging sites for PHP testing. Instead, you can just focus on testing your changes and ensuring everything works as it should.

Higher resource limits

We know some themes and plugins can be a little greedy for resources. (We’re looking at you, page builders!) 

So we have increased the default settings for all staging site PHP variables. For example, the max_input_vars value is now 20000 instead of 1000. This gives you more room to test large themes and plugins.

If you need more than this, write in to our support. They’ll tweak the settings. You can test under real-world conditions and avoid surprises when updates go live.

Tags:

You may also like


How do you manage your websites?

Managing multiple WordPress websites can be time consuming and error-prone. WP Remote will save you hours every day while providing you complete peace of mind.

Managing everything yourself

But it’s too time-consuming, complicated and stops you from achieving your full potential. You don’t want to put your clients’ sites at risk with inefficient management.

Putting together multiple tools

But these tools don’t work together seamlessly and end up costing you a lot more time and money.