Setting up a WordPress test site used to require time and some skill, as it was commonly manually set up on the local machine, but now with TasteWP, that process takes just a couple of seconds and is effortless. From the homepage of TasteWP, you can launch your first test site, with just two clicks, without even registering. This will get you your first test site in no time, and the test site will be live for two days. By taking a moment to register, you will grant yourself more test sites that have a longer lifetime and easier control over them. In this guide, you will learn how to launch a free WordPress test site with TasteWP.
TasteWP platform offers many extraordinary features, besides quick test sites, and before we dive deeper into some of them, let’s take the first step and sign up.
Launching WordPress test sites in a couple of seconds with TasteWP
Creating an account on TasteWP will unlock many cool features, and it is free, so we are going to start with that. For registration, you only need an email. For signed-up users, test sites have a longer life, of seven days, instead of two days, how much they last for unregistered users. With an account, you also have a maximum of six active test sites, instead of two.
Launching a test site with the “Set it up!” button will immediately create one, with the latest available stable version of WordPress and PHP. By default, test sites come with a few of the promoted plugins, but those can be removed.
Spinning up WordPress test sites with Advanced Setup
By clicking on the “Advanced setup” button, you can create a test site with a pre-defined setup. Advanced Setup lets you choose specific PHP and WordPress versions that will be applied, as well as a choice of a few pre-installed plugins and themes, and several options from Advanced WP Config. These include: WP debug and log, WP cron, WP cache, and automatic updates settings.
On the Advanced setup screen, you may give your site a custom name, if you don’t find the randomly generated ones enough funny. Optionally you can also set up WP multisite, and finally, choose to create it as a standard or a premium test site.
Managing your test sites from the Dashboard
On the Site Manager section of TasteWP Dashboard, users have a clear overview of their active websites, and can also see information about them such as size, expiry timer, PHP and WordPress versions that are used for each website, and also if they use multisite.
From the Site Manager, users can jump in directly to a test site’s admin area via secure login and users can also reset the admin password from here. Additional options include disabling all plugins on a test site, downloading debug log, changing the active PHP version, deleting sites, or upgrading them to premium.
Premium test sites have a size limit extended to 25GB, and last as long as users pay for them. It’s absolutely very easy to launch a free WordPress with TasteWP.
Quick plugin demo links
TasteWP offers the quickest way to launch demo sites of any plugin from the official WordPress repository. You just need to edit the plugin page URL so that “WordPress” is changed into “tastewp” and press Enter.
Let’s say for example that you were just reading our article on how to convert images on WordPress from PNG to JPG, and that you wanted to check out how the Smush plugin works out with your hands on it. Starting from the Smush plugin’s page: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/ you may just change the URL to https://tastewp.org/plugins/wp-smushit/ and run it.
In just a blink of an eye, you will have your test site ready and will be redirected directly to the plugin’s menu page within the WP admin area of the test site.
This cool demo trick works also on free WordPress themes, and rest assured, for the purpose of demoing, TasteWP will always pull the latest version of plugins and themes directly from the official WordPress repository.
And to make things simpler, Inisev, the company behind TasteWP has developed a magic bookmark, that you can add to your browser’s bookmarks, so it will save you the effort of manually editing the URL for the quick demos. This way, demos will be launched with just one click.
Site Templates and advanced demos
For the next-level demo startup, TasteWP offers a more sophisticated way of constructing demo links, called Site Templates. This feature is especially valued by plugin developers. With it, users can pre-define up to 5 plugins and a theme that will be installed with a single demo link.
For example, this link https://demo.tastewp.com/elementor-bundle will install the Astra theme as well as Elementor page builder with a couple of its complimentary plugins. The cool thing about the demo links is that they can also be created with free, premium, and custom plugins.
Benefits of using staging and testing sites
Breaking down a website is not too hard to do, especially for solopreneurs, bloggers, and starters in the WordPress world. To prevent this unwanted event, webmasters and developers rightfully choose to conduct tests and experiments on safe grounds.
TasteWP users have test sites hosted separately from their own servers, completely safe from doing any harm to their live sites with bad code and incompatible plugins.
Having a remote testing site can be good from the security perspective too, especially in cases when you need to test code or software that you don’t entirely trust, thus preventing security breaches.
Compared to local solutions, TasteWP test sites are not just unbelievably faster to set up, but they also don’t require any resources or cleaning up, as they are automatically cleaned up (deleted) after some time.
Conclusion
TasteWP offers a convenient solution for delivering WordPress test sites, and it does so in one of the 20 currently available languages, which will be automatically adjusted to the favoured one of your browser.
Available worldwide, TasteWP connects developers and clients, teachers and students, and serves WordPress veterans as well as fresh enthusiasts, as each of them is giving its own purpose to it. If you often browse through the WordPress plugins repository, you might have already come across a plugin that offers a demo on TasteWP.
We gave you some ideas on how you can use TasteWP to launch a free WordPress test site with TasteWP, but that is entirely up to you. And since it is completely free, why not take it out for a spin right now?