Designing a new site withing current site without gong live

You can install a new wp and use a copy of your current theme, as it’s theme. You can just copy your entire site as well but I don’t know enough about that to advise.

You can install the new wp in a new directory on your hosting account, it will be a subdirectory of your current domain. accessible as
http;//www.your domain.com/copy-of your-domain.com

with “copy-of-your-domain” being the name of the folder where you install wp.

First, git is great for stuff like this. If you don’t have access to a local server, which is the ideal way to go about development, or another site, you can create a subdomain, like test.example.com (do it in cpanel). Then:

1. Copy all the files over
2. Migrate your database using something like WP Migrate DB
3. Set the site so that’s it not publicly accessible with either settings in the .htaccess file or using a plugin like WP Maintenance Mode.

Then you’re free to work and blow up things without risk of anyone seeing them.

Many thanks to all of you for the help and help it was. Been blowing things up for the last couple of days.

Tim