Heatmap showing user interactions on a website

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3. Decide whether to keep the site alive or put it into maintenance mode
One of the most important decisions you make when redesigning WordPress is whether to work on your website or put it into maintenance mode. This decision can have a significant impact on your user experience and search engine rankings during the redesign process.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help you make the right decision:

How extensive is your redesign? For example, are you just changing the homepage or are you redoing the entire site?
How long will the redesign take? Is it a quick update that can be done in a few days or a major change that will take weeks?
Can your site be down for a while? About us can handle being down for a while.
How many visitors does your site get? A high traffic site will suffer more from downtime than a smaller, more personal blog.
Are you going to change the layout of your site? Are you just updating the look, or are you moving things around and changing web addresses?
Does your website handle important parts of your business? For example, do you have an online store that needs to stay open, or is your website primarily for information?
In general, we recommend keeping your site live during the redesign, especially if the process will take bulgaria telemarketing data some time and/or if your business operations will be significantly impacted by the downtime. It's also a good option if you don't want your site's SEO to be compromised.

In this case, you will need to set up a WordPress staging site or a local development environment. This way, you can experiment with the redesign without affecting the live site.

A staging site is essentially a copy of your website where you can safely make changes. Many hosting providers these days offer one-click staging features, including SiteGround (where we host WPBeginner).

For more information, see our guide on how to create a staging environment for WordPress .

Siteground staging site created
Alternatively, you may want to consider a local development site. This option creates a copy of your website on your personal computer, offering greater privacy and faster development times.

For this purpose, we recommend using the Local WP tool , which many of our team members use to test new features. Those interested can learn more about it in our article on how to install WordPress locally on Windows and Mac .