Hi Shirley-
From what you’ve described, it sounds like you’re using the BoldGrid Staging plugin for your development work. We no longer recommend using this plugin, since we’ve developed the BoldGrid Cloud WordPress staging service.
Cloud WordPress has several major advantages over the staging plugin.
- Nothing in your staging site can affect your live site’s functionality.
- You can test out new features like plugins and different menus.
- If you make any mistakes that crash the website, your production website is still running on your web host.
Using Cloud WordPress for staging consists of three main steps (click on the links for detailed instructions):
- Clone your website to staging
- Make your changes
- Deploy your staging website to production
For your second question, it’s generally best to use some form of “pretty” permalinks, rather than the plain links option. This gives you the ability to use plain language in your URL’s rather than the default “?page_id=1234” format. That said, if your menu is using Custom Links rather than Pages or Posts, you may need to update the links manually in your menu after switching your permalinks.