WordPress is a busy ecosystem that receives regular updates for:
Usually, there are a few good reasons behind every update released:
Now, each of these above updates could easily break your site or change the look and feel of your website.
So, it is important that you test these updates first on a staging site and see if anything breaks.
If nothing breaks, then you can perform these updates on the live site.
If your site doesn’t have a staging feature at all, then trust me, it is a good idea to move to a web host that has a staging feature inbuilt.
It will save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
According to my experience, WPEngine has the best staging site functionality.
I can’t stress it enough.
The importance of having an easy way to clone the website saves you a lot of time and headaches if you’re running a busy business website.