When you launch a new website, training the client is the bit that gets neglected. The block editor is mature enough now that clients can do far more than they used to, but anything new needs teaching. So training isn’t an optional extra, it’s part of the job.
The obvious place to do it is the staging site. You’ve already got one, it’s running the theme, the plugins, the content. Makes sense, right?
Well, not really. A staging site doesn’t feel like a sandbox, it feels like a real site. So your client either edits actual content or they’re too nervous to touch anything at all. And it’s another WordPress install you have to host, patch, and secure, quietly rotting into an out of date copy of the real thing if you leave it sitting there.
There’s a better way, and in my latest video I walk through it: WordPress Playground combined with Blueprints. Playground runs WordPress entirely in the browser (no server, no hosting, no database to manage), and a Blueprint is a single JSON file that tells it how to set itself up. Your theme pulled straight from GitHub, your custom plugins, some representative dummy content, all booting from one shareable link.
Your client clicks the link and gets their own private, fully configured copy of their site to break, un-break, and reload as many times as they like. No logins, no upkeep, no consequences. And six months after launch, when they’ve forgotten how to do something, that same link still works.
Watch the video here: WordPress Playground & Blueprints – The Client Training Tool You’re Probably Not Using
In the video I cover:
- Why staging sites make a poor training environment
- What Playground and Blueprints actually are, and how WordPress runs in a browser at all
- What a minimal Blueprint JSON file looks like (and why it’s less scary than it sounds)
- How to build one without writing any JSON, using the Playground Step Library or Pootle Playground
- How to generate the shareable link
- How I used this on a real block theme conversion project
- The honest limitations: persistence, email, and boot times
If you’re delivering block theme sites to clients and you’re still training them on staging, give this one a watch. It took me ten minutes to set up and it’s changed how I hand over every project since.
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