WordPress Development Behind the Scenes

After doing some research into how to develop a WordPress site in a “staging” area behind the scenes before going public, I have finally stumbled upon an elegant and simple solution:

• Using a plugin like simply-static, convert all wordpress-generated data to static html files.
• Tell nginx to try those files first (unless there is a logged-in user) falling back to the normal wordpress generation when they can’t be found.
• Now, public viewers will bypass wordpress entirely, grabbing all the static files while you happily do your coding in the background.
• When you are ready to go public with your modified design, either regenerate the static files for a super-fast site or delete the static files. Without the html files, nginx will simply hand the requests over to wordpress for dynamic generation.