Case Study: Mexico News Daily
Mexico News Daily is a popular English-language source for news about Mexico. The site publisher, Tony Richards, is also an avid user of WP Stagecoach: he uses WP Stagecoach to create a staging copy of Mexico News Daily almost every day. I contacted Tony to ask how he uses staging sites. Here is what he had to say:
“The staging site is a quick and simple way of implementing design changes and tweaks, a process that is ongoing. Prior to setting up WP Stagecoach I used a cloned version of the site but copying the production site was way too time-consuming. Fine for doing a complete redesign but not for ongoing tweaks and updates. I made a fairly major design change recently to the bottom half of our pages, pasting new code on the fly from the clone copy. Everything worked out and it was good for an adrenalin rush but that’s when I began thinking it was time to find a saner option, so I did a search and up came WP Stagecoach.
“I’m kind of fussy about page design so I like to be able to make small changes quickly, and that I can now do without worrying about breaking anything. At first I was pretty cautious using Stagecoach, going as far as to download any files I was going to change just in case things went south. They never did.
“It is also useful for testing plugin upgrades to make sure nothing is broken. Today I installed a new popup plugin, but did so on the staging site and got the popup working well across different devices, thoroughly tested everything and then simply imported everything over to the production site. Very smooth and worry-free.
“Mexico News Daily is probably the most popular English-language source for news about Mexico with over 300,000 page views per month. We curate news items from (mostly) Spanish-language newspapers and web-based publications and rewrite them in English for an audience of expats, investors and others with an interest in current affairs in Mexico. We have very active reader engagement on the site and 12,000 subscribers to an email news summary that we send three times a week.
“The service is a year old and continues to see steady growth in reader numbers.
“We built our own WordPress theme for the site, which is fully responsive, and operate in Mexico with a staff of two and several freelancers.”
We are grateful to Tony for sharing his story with us!
