How to Create a Test Site & Transfer After Site Check

Author: Ian McAllister

If you're as cautious as I am you'll want to create a test site that you can test out thoroughly before you allow the world to see it.

Test Webpage

I even like to test individual web pages when I do anything that I'm not sure of. That way I don't have to make a fool of myself putting up a page that doesn't work. Yes, you're right! You couldn't see this page until I had made sure that it worked.

Site Check Video

When I have time I'll create a video showing you exactly how to use a test site, but I'll try to give you enough information here to do the job without seeing it. If you have joined my free membership I'll let you know as soon as I get round to making the video.

If you have followed my advice, you'll have your site hosted with webhostingbuzz so I'll describe how to set up your test websites on that host. If you have a different host, it's just a case of looking carefully through your cPanel until you find what you need.

Log in to your cPanel. If you don't have details of how to do that, you can usually access it at http://yourdomain:2083/ then you put in your username and password in the usual way. You can also change your password once you get into cPanel.

Under the heading "domains" you'll find subdomains. Click the icon.

You are going to create a sub-domain. I'll assume you call it "test", but you can call it anything you like. You will then visit it at http://test.yourdomain (note the dot after the word "test".

In the sub-domain field enter "test". If you only have one domain you won't have to choose the domain for your site tester.

Document root is important because it sets up what you want to happen when you send someone to "/" as the root relative address. Put in "/public_html/test" (without the quote marks) and click Create.

When you get the success message, write down your username, which will probably be test@yourdomain

Start your experience as a website tester by trying to browse http://test.yourdomain. It should show you an empty directory listing. You never want that to happen for a public directory, so always create an index.html (or php) file in every directory. If you don't have anything to put in it just put a message saying "There shouldn't be any links to this page. Please click here to go to my home page".

Hiding Your Site Check Site

The whole purpose of your test site is to avoid making a fool of yourself for the world to see, so your next step is to forbid the search engines to scan your website. Assuming that you don't already have a robots.txt file (I show you elsewhere how to make one) I suggest that you make one in your text editor, such as notepad.

Add a line to the end of the file saying
Disallow: /test/

Save the file to your root directory, then use FTP to send it to your test directory. You'll have to set up your test directory in the FTP so as to navigate to it, or you can simply go to public_html then to your test directory, and save the file there.

Reputable search engines will now ignore your test websites, and I like to think of the rogue robots sending visitors to your test site after your have removed all the contents. They would get the reputation of having too many broken links.

Addressing your test webpage

Each time you put a link to somewhere in your test site, use a relative address, so that it will be easy to transfer to the proper domain after all your website tester procedures are completed. The relative address is just your full URL with the first bit missed off. I don't want to go into details here, so I'll just give a few examples

http://yourdomain/index.php becomes /
http://test.yourdomain/index.php becomes /
http://test.yourdomain/article1.php becomes /article1.php
http://test.yourdomain/subdomain1/article3.php becomes /subdomain1/article3.php

You'll see that the relative address is exactly the same whether you are addressing your test sub-domain or your proper domain. That means that when you've succeeded in getting everything working as you want, and run XENU over it (see my video in the membership section) to test for broken links, you can simply use FTP to empty your test directory at your host, and send the same files to your proper domain. (Run XENU over the proper domain again just to make sure that everything has gone well).

After all, when you create a test site the whole idea is to be able to transfer it easily once you finish testing it.