If you are looking for a quick and easy way to get create a WordPress test site or staging website for free, TasteWP provides the simplest and fastest solution. A couple of clicks is just enough for you to get your first free WordPress test site generated in a flash.
Creating test WordPress sites from scratch, running quick plugin tests, creating staging environments, or simply getting familiar with WordPress – from the platform itself or from the official WordPress repository are just some of the few use cases for TasteWP. In this article, you’ll get more familiar with the platform and how you can use it.
Unlike older local solutions for setting up WordPress test/staging environments, TasteWP is entirely online, and you can easily share access to your test sites with colleagues or clients. No need to install and set up a local host with MySQL and PHP anymore!
Getting started with TasteWP
Starting from the TasteWP home screen, you can start up your first free WordPress test site by clicking on Set it up! button after ticking the Terms checkbox. You will be pleasantly surprised that the brand-new test site creation takes less than three seconds.
What also makes a nice addition to TasteWP is the automatic language selection based on the user’s browser. Both TasteWP and the test sites it spins up will be served in the user’s preferred language if it is one of the twenty supported languages.
Signing up on TasteWP comes with several advantages. Most notably, your test WordPress sites will last seven days instead of two, and you will be able to have six active free test sites at the time, with the ability to manage all of them.
The quick test site launch applies the latest WordPress and PHP versions to the test sites. Using Advanced Setup, you can pre-define a number of options for your test site, which are organized into several groups –
- You can select the specific versions of WordPress and PHP that will be used for the test site
- Editing is available for some of the WP Config options, e.g. for debugging, caching, or for WP cron
- Choosing from several recommended plugins and themes is possible, but not mandatory
- If you find randomly generated test site names too silly, you can give your sites a custom name
- WordPress multisite creation is optional
- If you are not happy with the standard test site limitations, you can assign the Premium site here as well
If you are not happy with the randomly generated funny name for the site, you can give it a custom name.
Editing the Advanced setup options does not affect the test site creation time, and such sites or any other test sites on the TasteWP platform – demo or template sites are still being created in a flash. And sites are standard full WordPress sites, without anything taken out from them in order for them to keep lighter.
Additional cool features from TasteWP
One of the most widely used TasteWP features is the quick launch of WordPress plugin demo sites. This feature allows you to start a demo of any plugin simply from the official WordPress directory.
All you need to do is simply swap the “wordpress” with “tastewp” in the plugin’s page URL, and hit Enter. Let’s say that you were just reading our article about setting up WP Mail SMTP and you wanted to try it on a test site. You can edit https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/ into https://tastewp.org/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/ and in a couple of seconds, you will be behind the WP Dashboard of the demo site with the WP Mail SMTP plugin already installed.
The quick demo launch trick also works on free WordPress themes.
Inisev, the team behind TasteWP has made this demo running even easier with a magic bookmark. Add this to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar and you can run plugin and theme demos with a single click while you are on the page of any WP plugin or theme.
While quick demo links are predominantly used to check out third-party plugins and themes, you can also create a Site Template on TasteWP, where the generated link will create a fresh WordPress instance with a theme and up to five plugins of your choosing.
Site Templates can be used with both free and custom plugins, and this feature is loved by plugin developers as it gives the opportunity to share the links for demo sites with their prospects.
Check out this demo link for an example: https://tastewp.com/template/generatetemplate. This demo link will install a popular GeneratePress theme that we previously reviewed, with related plugins: GenerateBlocks and WP Show Posts.
All Site Templates and demo links can be started up even by unregistered users. Even the simplest, default test site can be launched remotely with the simple link https://tastewp.com/new.
TasteWP test sites can be without an expiry timer. Opposite to standard TastWP test sites that last for a week, premium test sites last as long as you need them, and they also have an expanded maximum size limit, of 20GB.
Advantages of TasteWP
Every WordPress veteran will immediately recognize how blazingly fast TasteWP is. Starting up a test site with TasteWP is unquestionably faster than any developer could do manually.
Local test sites once used to be the most common. But in this time and age, increasingly more services are constantly using an online connection, and also with the era of global teams, it is becoming less practical to work locally.
Online access to test sites is important for the development teams, as well as developers and their clients, that are often spread across the globe.
Moreover, many WordPress developers have been in a situation where some code or a plugin worked perfectly locally, while it didn’t quite work well on the real hosting server.
Having test sites or staging sites on the third-party (secure) server also means that no resources need to be wasted on the live server or local machine. Cleaning up behind is also being automatically taken care of by TasteWP.
Because all TasteWP test sites are being hosted on a secure third-party server, WordPress users can use TasteWP as the safe ground for checking out software or code that they don’t entirely trust because no harm can be done this way.
Conclusion
TasteWP is a WordPress sandbox solution that is straightforward to use. A beautiful and intuitive interface combined with great functionality and features can easily attract both WordPress beginners and experienced developers.
Being available worldwide for free, why not take it for a spin right now?