How to Create a WordPress Sandbox (Without Breaking Your Site)

One wrong plugin update, one theme conflict, or one small configuration change can break your entire WordPress site. The pressure to keep your website running perfectly while still improving it creates an impossible situation.

A WordPress sandbox solves this problem. A sandbox is a safe copy of your website which gives you the freedom to make mistakes. Test everything. Break things safely. 

How? We’ll show you. 

In this article, we’ve put WordPress sandbox plugins, online environments, local tools, and hosting options through their paces. We’ll show you exactly how to create WordPress sandbox environments for every use case.

TL;DR The best WordPress sandbox is BlogVault staging. Off your web hosting, real-world server configuration, and complete separation from your site for the safest tests you can imagine. Spin up a sandbox in minutes with your latest backup. No setup, no installation, no configuration. 

What is a WordPress sandbox?

A WordPress sandbox is a copy of your website where you can test changes safely. Whether you need a comprehensive testing environment or just a simple WordPress play area for quick experiments, the right approach protects your live site from costly mistakes.

Try out new updates before they go live. Test new features and functions. You can even install new plugins without worry. 

The live website stays online while you work. Your visitors see no downtime. They experience no broken pages or missing content.

Mistakes on your live site cost money. A broken checkout page means lost sales. A plugin conflict can crash your entire website. 

Setting up a WordPress development sandbox solves this challenge for developers and site owners alike.

How to create WordPress sandbox: Quick start guide

Here’s the fastest way to get started with any sandbox for WordPress:

Each approach serves different needs, but all give you the safety to test without breaking your live site.

Option 1: Using a WordPress sandbox plugin [recommended]

A WordPress staging plugin is the best and safest way to test out anything on a copy of your site.

Most good backup plugins will have a sandbox option, as the best way to create a sandbox for WordPress is from a BlogVault backup of your production site. 

We’ll demonstrate how to test a major update in a sandbox environment, before applying the update to your production site. 

1. On our site, we haven’t updated WordPress in a while, so we are a fair few versions behind.

2. Choose the option for Sandbox update, and wait. 

In the background, BlogVault: 

• Creates a sandbox of your site, and applies the update there.
• Then, it takes a screenshot of your site and the sandbox site for comparison. Using visual regression testing, each pixel of the screenshots are compared for discrepancies. 
• If a variance is found, you can go into the sandbox to resolve any issues. 

🔥 With BlogVault’s sandbox, you can test everything from plugins to themes to core updates to php versions. Safely, and without using any of your production server resources.

Other plugin options

1. WP Staging

The WP Staging plugin creates a sandbox site directly on the same server as your live site. 

There are many reasons why this can be problematic (usage of server space, potential conflicts, etc.), so we are not a fan of this approach. 

Setup

Setup takes about 5 minutes to complete, and is super simple. 

You can choose which parts of your site to copy; specific plugins, themes, or even database tables. We chose to opt for the full site for testing.

In the setup, there is a dropdown for advanced options that is for pro users. Although we had everything we needed to create a sandbox site, we checked what was hidden in the dropdown out of curiosity.

The option to allow emails was checked, and we couldn’t uncheck it. This means our sandbox site can send emails out to people registered on our site. We don’t want this at all, and rather not have people receive emails from any testing done on the sandbox site. 

Out of the other options, disabling cron jobs would have been nice too. 

But the symlink for the uploads folder really caught our attention. In order to save time while creating the sandbox, you can opt to link the uploads folder of your production site to the sandbox site. Which is a good idea, in theory, because we wouldn’t use it. The potential for links getting messed up is too high for our liking. And then we clicked on the tooltip and realised that it could cause duplicate content issues. Yikes. Thanks but no thanks. 

You use the same login credentials as your WordPress site to access the sandbox. While we don’t like that the sandbox is in a subfolder, we really like that it is behind a login so that it cannot be indexed. 

Usage

Once you open up the sandbox site, you can immediately see that the admin bar is orange; as opposed to the normal black. This is a nifty visual reminder that this is the sandbox site, and not to do silly things on the actual site. (Ideally don’t do silly things anywhere, but a sandbox is at least a safe zone to do them.) 

The wp-admin also has the orange strip for what is it worth, so the visual cues continue through to the admin area. Excellent usability.

Usage is just like your production site, so you can add, modify and delete at will. 

Note: Since merging back to production is a pro feature, we weren’t able to test it.

📝 Overall, WP Staging does what it says, and reasonably well with some caveats. The sandbox site did trip up a firewall, but we were able to whitelist it and proceed without too much hassle. 

2. WP Stagecoach

The next plugin on our testing list is WP Stagecoach. 

You’ll need to grab the plugin from their site. You’re not going to find it in the repo’s plugins’ directory. 

Note: Also check out known incompatibilities before using. That list is really big.

There is a 5-day free trial, which is what we tried to use for this review.

You may have noticed the “tried to use” in the previous sentence. That’s because we got irretrievably stuck on the checkout page. The spinner refused to stop. Therefore, that became the end of our review. 

Option 2: WordPress play areas online (without a domain)

Online WordPress play area tools give you a feel for WordPress’ capabilities without too much investment of effort or time. Perhaps you have been exploring a shift from Squarespace to WordPress, for example. 

InstaWP

InstaWP is our tool of choice to spin up a quick WordPress development area online. 

You will need to sign up though, as opposed to some of the other entries on this list. On the plus side, it is a far more fully featured sandbox tool, as compared to TasteWP or WP Playground.

You can customise a site with their available options for plugins, and then add in your credit card details for a credit. Choose a plan that suits your needs, and carry through testing. 

The difference between this tool and others are the options to create a sandbox for WordPress. You can choose configurations beyond just the WordPress version or server, but also plugins across various categories and themes. 

What we really liked is the ability to save the configs as snapshots for reuse later. Who doesn’t love a good template? 

Finally, you can also import a backup to InstaWP to tinker with. 

Similar tools and alternatives

TasteWP

TasteWP offers instant site setup with more controls than WP Playground. You don’t need to sign up, which is a nice touch for quick testing.

You get a site for 48 hours with a URL on the TasteWP domain. The time limit works well for short-term testing needs. If you need more time, you’ll have to upgrade to a premium plan to extend the site’s expiry.

There’s also an option to set up a more custom install with advanced WordPress setup. This gives you flexibility when you need specific configurations for your testing environment.

The no-signup approach makes TasteWP particularly handy when you want to quickly test a plugin or theme without the commitment of creating yet another account.

WP Playground

WP Playground comes from the official WordPress Foundation, making it one of the easiest ways to try out a fresh WordPress install. All you need to do is visit to get started.

You can access the wp-admin dashboard and other stock pages directly within the playground. There’s a URL bar just above the admin bar where you can see the URLs that would typically lead you to those internal pages.

What we really like about WP Playground is that you can adjust the WordPress version and PHP versions as you like. In the same settings, you can enable network access so that you can access the plugin and theme directories, and install plugins and themes as you normally would on a site.

However, there’s no way to share or save any changes you make to the playground sandbox. If you refresh your browser, all progress is lost. It’s quite ephemeral that way.

WP Playground, in our opinion, is a way to try out WordPress for the first time, or perhaps learn about it in a very safe environment. It’s necessarily limited in its use cases otherwise.

WP Sandbox

We had to test this one out, because sandbox is in the name after all.

Straight out the gate, we’re not impressed that the version of WordPress offered here is WordPress 6. As of doing research for this article, the latest version is 6.8.1. We take updates very seriously around these parts.

The site lasts for 8 hours, with the option to extend with a pro plan. That’s a shorter timeframe than TasteWP’s 48-hour offering, which doesn’t help its case.

Bitnami

You can also launch a single WordPress instance using Bitnami.

Bitnami packages have a preset set of plugins and themes for WordPress, mostly in concert with Automattic. This gives you a more structured starting point compared to the customisable setups we’ve looked at so far.

You will need a billing account to get this instance up and running on any of the web services. This means it’s not as quick to test as the free options, but you do get more control over your cloud environment.

Option 3: Local WordPress sandbox environment

Local sandboxes for WordPress give you complete control over your testing environment. You’re working directly on your own machine, which means faster loading times and no internet dependency.

However these very pros are cons in a different light. Faster loading times on your machine don’t mirror the real world. And honestly? It is better to factor in network latency and resolution in a sandbox environment. 

In any case, we tested out a bunch of solutions for setting up a WordPress development sandbox on your machine. 

3.1 Use a packaged application

Local

The OG of all WordPress package applications is Local or LocalWP. It is widely considered the best, and for very good reason. We put the application through its paces, and we were suitably impressed. 

Setup 

Download and install LocalWP. There are a few versions available for popular operating systems. You can skip account creation altogether and get stuck into creating a local WordPress sandbox right away.

Bear in mind that many of the really cool features, like live links (shareable live links to your local sandbox site) are not available without an account.

Although the primary option is to create a new site, you can also choose to start with a template or import a WordPress backup to work on locally. Instead of a new site, we imported a BlogVault backup into Local to try out the sandbox features.

Note: We strongly recommend using custom server settings to match your production environment as closely as possible to minimise compatibility issues later on. If we had a penny for every error mismatched PHP versions have caused us… we’d be very rich.

The setup was very smooth, and we had a working local version of our site up and running in minutes. You use the same credentials as your live site to access wp-admin. (Can we take a moment to appreciate how fantastic a BlogVault backup is?)

While setting up, we encountered an odd issue with the SSL certificate. The dashboard has an option to install an SSL certificate specifically for the local site, but the trusting process failed. It turns out it was because of the device operating system. It was not a quick fix, but we followed the steps in the documentation, and soon we were able to access the site through a browser without any of those pesky security warnings. Bear in mind that we had to go digging in keychain access in our settings, manually trust the certificate, and then search and replace all the URLs. Fun, it was not.

Usage

Once installed, you can use the site in much the same way you would a site online. A feature we really liked is that the setup is fully automated, and you have a full suite of investigative tools at your disposal without having to set anything up manually. It is completely idiot-proof. 

For instance, you can view the contents of your site database in Adminer. It’s packaged into the application. Equally, you can use an in-built shell terminal to try out WP-CLI commands. It’s especially nice to start exactly where you want to, without having to navigate through to the root folder manually.

Obviously, you don’t need FTP access, as you can access your own filesystem any time you need to. However the shortcut on the dashboard is a very nice touch.

You can make changes in the local sandbox, and push them live with integrations to WP Engine and Flywheel. (Unsurprising, as it’s a WP Engine product.) You can also hook up other hosting providers via WP Migrate, but we didn’t test that feature out.

If you would prefer an alternative just for Windows machines, give Laragon a try. We haven’t tested it out (because setting up a Windows virtual machine for this would have destroyed our will to live), but we hear good things.

3.2 Install WordPress locally using MAMP

Installing WordPress on localhost is not for the faint of heart. While there are plenty of tutorials online extolling how easy it is to do, each individual’s computer is… an individual in its own right. 

There is just no way to cover all the potential errors across operating systems, configs, and so on, so we’re giving you the barebones of a process; mainly to dissuade you from this course of action. 

1. You will need to install a server and start it to run locally. 
2. Then install WordPress.
3. Finally install phpMyAdmin to wrangle your database. 
4. Then figure out the connections between all of these different pieces.

Once the setup is done, download a site backup, and restore onto the local installation.

3.3 Install locally using a virtual machine from Bitnami

You need to have Linux installed, and virtual machine software as well, which allows for multiple OS to be used on the same machine.

Download and install the package to set up a WordPress development sandbox on your machine.

Downsides of this the localhost approach

In case it wasn’t clear from the section before, we strongly discourage you from using this method. 

• Publishing is a hassle: After wrapping up the installation and setup, you will have to publish your site live from local, which is not easy to do. It’s fairly complex to migrate to live. Or you will need to recreate the site live.

• Not indicative of real-world metrics: You do not have real world metrics or dynamic elements on your local machine, so it’s not a good representation of how your site will perform online. For example, it’s tricky to set up an SSL certificate on your local site. You have to go into the device settings to create and set one up—and that’s the least critical production-environment variable you would need to mimic.

• Never going to be 100%: Not everything can be tested on a local machine. It’s difficult and technical to set up.

Option 4: Use the sandbox with your host

Some web hosts provide a sandbox environment as a part of your hosting plan. It should be easy enough to set up, and will be visible on your dashboard if it’s included.

For example, with Cloudways, you will find the option with your applications. 

Under your list of applications, select the site you want for the sandbox. Select the option, and follow onscreen instructions to create an online sandbox for your WordPress site.

There are downsides to using your web host for a sandbox. Apart from taking up server resources, it might well be quite expensive. Additionally, a sandbox site may not be isolated well from your live site; which causes its own host of issues. It really depends on the host in question.

Best practices for WordPress sandboxes

Getting your sandbox setup right is only half the battle. Following these practices will help you avoid the common pitfalls that can turn your safe testing environment into a headache.

• Your sandbox should always be separate from production; testing shouldn’t affect production in any way. For best results, it should be an exact copy of your live site.

• Always test major releases before applying them to your live site. This simple step can save you from hours of troubleshooting later.

• Always replicate the changes and tests on the production site, rather than using a merge feature. This prevents a lot of conflicts, and also safeguards any changes made to the production site when the sandbox was in use.

Special note about premium plugins

Premium plugins and sandbox environments don’t always play nicely together. Licensing restrictions can make testing more complicated than it needs to be.

If you have a premium plugin or theme, it depends on the individual developer how they manage development licenses—if at all.

As a general rule of thumb, bigger or more established developers will have better policies around this, like Elementor for example. In October 2024, they added support for sandboxes which doesn’t affect the production environment.

That’s a wrap

WordPress sites break easily. One plugin update or theme change can crash your entire website. You need a way to test safely without risking your live site.

A WordPress sandbox gives you that safety. It’s a copy of your website where you can break things without consequences. Test updates, try new designs, and experiment freely while your real site stays online.

We’ve tested WordPress sandbox plugins, online tools, local environments, and hosting options to find what works best.

Our recommendation? BlogVault staging. You get complete separation from your live site and can create a sandbox in minutes using your latest backup. No complex setup required.

FAQs

What is a WordPress sandbox?

A WordPress sandbox is a safe testing environment where you can try changes without affecting your live website. Think of it as a practice area where you can experiment with new plugins, themes, or updates before applying them to your actual site.

How do I create a sandbox in WordPress?

You have several options to create a WordPress sandbox. We recommend BlogVault’s staging feature, which creates the perfect WordPress sandbox of your site. You can also use online tools like TasteWP or WP Playground for quick tests. 

What are the benefits of using a WordPress sandbox?

A sandbox prevents costly mistakes on your live site. You can test updates, try new designs, and experiment with plugins without risking downtime or broken functionality. It saves money by catching problems before they affect your visitors.

Can you test plugins in a WordPress sandbox?

Yes, testing plugins in a sandbox is one of its main purposes. You can install, activate, and configure plugins to see how they work with your site before adding them to your live environment. Having said that, not all sandbox tools have this feature. Use BlogVault for its comprehensive WordPress sandbox features. 

How is a WordPress sandbox different from a staging site?

WordPress sandboxes are often used interchangeably with staging. However staging sites typically refer to more permanent testing environments that mirror your production setup. Sandboxes can be temporary and are used for quick experiments or one-off testing.

How to create a sandbox in WordPress?

The easiest way is to use a sandbox plugin or service. We recommend BlogVault for creating reliable environments. You can also use online tools like InstaWP for quick tests, or set up local environments using tools like LocalWP.

What is sandbox mode in WordPress?

Sandbox mode refers to running WordPress in a contained environment where changes don’t affect your live site. It’s a state where you can safely test and experiment without consequences.

What is WordPress playground?

WordPress Playground is an official tool from the WordPress Foundation that lets you try WordPress instantly in your browser. You can test different WordPress and PHP versions, but changes aren’t saved when you refresh the page.

Which is the best plugin to create a local sandbox version of a WordPress site for testing changes?

For a local WordPress development sandbox, use LocalWP. It offers a user-friendly interface with helpful developer tools.

Does WordPress have a sandbox?

WordPress itself doesn’t include a built-in sandbox, but the WordPress Foundation provides WordPress Playground for basic testing. For full sandbox functionality, you’ll need third-party tools or hosting features.

Can I test WordPress for free?

Yes, you can test WordPress for free using several methods. WordPress Playground, InstaWP, and LocalWP all offer free testing environments. Many plugins also have free versions, though with limited features.