If you have a WordPress website for your restaurant, you probably have to edit your website.
But you don’t want to risk breaking your website by making edits to your live website. If you are adding a plugins or making an edit and something breaks, your website will go down.
So, you want to make sure that you copy your current website to create a staging environment, then make your edits on the staging website. That way, your live website will still be available for people to find and use, while you can still test and make edits to your staging website. Once you know that your edits don’t break your site, you can apply your edits to your live website.
One thing you need to do with your staging site is to make sure that it won’t show in search engines.
You do not want your staging site to show on search engines because you will be making edits that you are not sure you want to be public.
Your staging site is also a duplicate of your live site. And you don’t want duplicate content hanging around Google.
So you want to make sure that your website cannot be indexed by search engines.
How can you do that with a WordPress website?
There are two ways you can do this:
cPanel method:
Log in to your cPanel. Once you are in your cPanel, go to your File Manager.
Once you are in your file manager, find your robots.txt file. By default, it should be in your public_html folder. Once you are in your robots.txt file, make sure the file has this in it:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The ‘Disallow: /’ will make sure that search engines are not allowed to index your site.
Plugin Method:
In your WordPress dashboard, click on plugins and add a plugin.
Search for File Manager. Install and activate it.
Once its activated, you will see it on the left side menu. Click on File Manager and find your robots.txt file. By default, it should be in your public_html folder. Once you are in your robots.txt file, make sure the file has this in it:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The ‘Disallow: /’ will make sure that search engines are not allowed to index your site.
That’s all you have to do to make sure your staging site doesn’t show up in search engines!
