Creating a staging area for Wordpress.com site

Question

I'm nearly a complete newbie to Wordpress and Woocommerce and I'm helping out a friend. She's set up a shop, using Wordpress.com and Woocommerce and has asked me to help her with reconfiguring some of the 'delivery' settings in Woocommerce. My instinct is to set up a local environment, so I can have a play around and check that my changes haven't compromised the 'production' site - I'm after a little guidance on how to do this.

I've set up a vagrant box on my local machine - CentOS, LAMP stack, and have installed Wordpress - that's all up and running. I'd like to transfer her site - I guess that means wp-admin/* and wp-config/* plus the db. Is that right? Is the best way to do that a backup/restore plugin? I'm wary about installing paid-for plugins without my friend's OK - it's her business - but I'm happy to make the case if necessary. What about deploying back to production (not the database - although that depends a bit on what is stored there)?

If the answer to this is: stop using Wordpress.com and use a provider that will give you ftp access, I'm pretty happy to do that, but that will be a medium-term change.

Thanks - Adam.

Answer 1

If your friend has a wordpess.com business account which im guessing she has if she is using woocommerce you can always go down the plugin route.

if you want to move to a stage variant you could possibly use WP Staging plugin which will give you a copy of the site to play with

if you want to go down the local route or move to a cheap staging host which you could pick up really cheap you could use duplicator, both of these plugins are available on wordpress.com