Recently I’ve had several discussions with colleagues asking me for the debugging practices that I use. I try to constantly enhance my workflow, resources and improve the quality of my work by speeding up the process of narrowing down the possible reasons for a bug or a feature limitation. Speaking WordPress-wise, I’ll list a couple of things that I consider important. Some of them are more than obvious, but somehow people misuse them or forget about them at a moment of crisis (so to speak).
Before you start: always do backups. Debug your web application locally, test properly and ensure that everything is on set before deploying to the real server. Best practices teach that a local server -> staging/dev server -> production server is a good setup to prevent the obvious error of hitting the live website.