Setting up a test site

When you want to detect and troubleshoot possible conflicts of Advanced Ads with other plugins or your theme, it is helpful to recreate your setup on a test site.

Recreating your setup provides an independent environment where you can play and try around without worrying about breaking your running website. You can create additional admins and users for your test site to let others contribute and help.

When you have already estimated possible sources of error as described in our tutorial “How to check for plugin and theme conflicts” without success, it might be the time to let our support look at your setup of Advanced Ads.

How to set up a test site

To determine whether Advanced Ads causes a plugin or theme conflict, we need to be able to see the issue live and look at the code.

We can do this best in a test environment. There are two options to create one.

Create your staging site

A staging site is a copy of your production site where one can test new plugins or conflicts.

Many dedicated WordPress hosting companies like WP Engine or Siteground support setting up a staging environment automatically.

Alternatively, you can set up a staging site using the free WP Staging plugin. It creates a copy of your website in a subdirectory. Only make sure you hide the site from search engines under Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility.

If your system sends emails to users, e.g., payment reminders or newsletters, you might want to use a plugin like Disable Emails to stop that on the staging site.

Giving our support access to your test site

After creating a staging site for your website, you can work with your WordPress dashboard as you know it. Go to Users > Add New to create a new login for anybody you want to have access to your backend.

This could be us to look at your setup of Advanced Ads.

Adding a new user on a test site
Add a new user to your test site

Use one of our test sites

If you cannot provide a staging site, then we can give you access to one of our test sites.

While it might be easier for you if we give you access to a working WordPress site, it could take longer for you to reproduce the issue there.

You can use the Import/Export tool under Advanced Ads > Settings > General > Import/Export to reproduce your ad setup on our test site.

Further Information

If you need help troubleshooting your ad setup with Advanced Ads Pro or our All Access bundle, drop us a line.

See also our list of known plugin conflicts and theme conflicts.

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