[QUESTION] Page Speed Reports on Staging Sites

Hi,

a staging environment is actually a must when creating sites for others. There are really many ways to build up one or more staging sites for a project (e.g XAMP, LocalWP, DevKinsta, etc...) but my favorite setup is a cheap VPS on DigitalOcean ($5) or Vultr ($6) and a free domain (ga, tk, etc..) from freenom.com. I prefer Vultr most of the time, because they have best speed and a really low TTFB...

That way i can have a 1to1 mirrored project installation and the only difference between staging- to live-site is the domain name...for instance production site xyz.com and staging site xyz.tk

After clients review, i push the approved changes from the staging to the live site with WPvivid Backup Plugin (free) which has a site automigration feature from one domain to another. No need for CPANEL or other bloatware of that sort.

With the above setup i can also run the GMetrix or PageSpeed Insights tests, finetune the staging sites based on the recommendations i get from GM, and lroll out the configuration to the live site.

Hope this helps a bit,
Regards

RogerM said:

The problem I found with your way is that when working particularly on improving a site´s page loading speed hosting a site locally will dramatically skew the results when testing the changes you do to the site.

The same issue we will face when creating a staging environment or cloning the client´s site on a hosting service that is a more robust and faster hosting alternative (Like Digital Ocean) than the hosting where the site is currently been hosted on by the client.

Click to expand...

Yes indeed. It happens sometimes that the client asks me why the staging site is so much faster than his chosen hosting service. The answer is usually because they choose the cheapest WP hosting they can find.
Then again some choose to upgrade the hosting plan, others switch to a VPS and others continue with cheap over performance.

Regards,
CB