Do you need to demonstrate your awesome WordPress plugin or theme to potential clients but don’t want to risk having them access your main site? There are several options available for creating a demo WordPress site. It’s definitely a good idea to keep things separate.
You need to keep in mind that when you manage the demo yourself:
- anyone can overwrite what the other users did before them and this may not be professional
- your demo contact form(s) may most likely start getting some spam
- you can make change and change the login info of the demo account can do
- you have to reset/clean the demo site every few days/weeks;
- You have to write or publish the login details i.e. no auto-login
The Demo site Set up Steps
- Create a Template site
- Export that Template site
- Create a subfolder (easier) or set up a subdomain
- Upload & import the Template site
- Make sure the demo site is not indexed by the search engines
The very first thing is that you need to set up a template site that will be used as a foundation for your demos. Then you need to configure it, add some content to it, remove the default plugins, posts, pages and comments etc.
Then you need to export that WordPress site and copy it over to a new location.
You can use a folder e.g. /demo/ or a subdomain such as demo.exmaple.com and set up wordpress there.
We strongly recommend that you use a separate WordPress hosting service or a service such as WPDemo.net to host your demo site. This is because you’re super busy and most likely won’t notice an update to a plugin, theme or WordPress itself. Hackers and spammers are just waiting for this to happen and will be ready to put their spammy content into your demo site.
After you have created the demo site it’s time to export it.
You can use the following tools/plugins to export your WordPress site.
- WP-CLI - requires ssh access and command line typing
- Duplicator
- All in One Migration