To preview your website before your DNS has propagated or without changing your DNS record, the best way to do this is to edit your hosts file to temporarily override the DNS records locally for your site.
To begin, edit your hosts file and add the follow entry:
SHARED-IP-ADDRESS yourdomain.com SHARED-IP-ADDRESS www.yourdomain.com SHARED-IP-ADDRESS subdomain.yourdomain.com #Optional - only if you're trying to preview a subdomain
You can find your IP address in the “Shared IP” field in cPanel, or use the following IP address for Plesk/High-Performance plans (changes frequently).
Once you’ve added the entry, save the file and visit your domain in the browser. You’ll get an SSL error which you can safely ignore and skip, and you’ll be seeing the version of your site hosted on our server!
You may need to clear your browser’s DNS cache.
Alternatively, you can set up a mirror of your site on a subdomain and point the DNS records for that subdomain without changing them for your main site.
