Definitely. I mean, why risk your sales and profit?

And, just a friendly reminder, make sure all your old URL are 301 redirect to the correspond page on your new site. It is better than sent them to 404 page and risk losing some potential sales.

- Rufas

You have 2 options... well ok, you have more, but here's 2.

1. Create a subdomain and install your WordPress there.

Something like beta.yourstore.com
And then make that folder password protected with .htaccess.

You can do the password protection manually if you know how or if you have a cPanel then there should be a tool called "Password Protect Directories" that you can do it with.

2. Get private development server

There's many ways for this, but I will give you the free one, that I use myself.

What you need is to install Apache server with PHP and MySQL to your computer.
This isn't as hard as it may first sound like, because there is this package called XAMPP and it contains all of these and comes with phpMyAdmin also, so you can have easy access to your database. (that's the same tool your cPanel has)

Just install the software, start up your new private development server and you are done.

If you're using Apache, you can create an .htaccess file with the following contents.


order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 111.111.111.111
allow from 222.222.222.222

Only those with the IP addresses listed will be able to access the site. You can add as many IP's as you'd like.