Staging Site Advice

I really love the experience of switching to the Fluent ecosystem from BuddyBoss+Learndash (plus lots of customization that brings major headaches in time)!

I want to make sure to be extra careful with the new setup and hope to implement best practices in terms of introducing any future changes via staging first.

What are the best practices for creating a staging site for a dynamic setup like this community? I'm using XCloud and can easily set up a staging site there. I'm going to put the staging site on staging.mydomain.com

Is it just a matter of manually disabling notifications and automations?

For now, I have this list:

- (FluentSMTP): Go to Settings > FluentSMTP > Settings > "Disable Email Sending"

- (Fluent Community): Uncheck the options for "Send Email on New Post," "Send Email on Mention," etc.

- (FluentCRM) FluentCRM > Automations: Select all active automations and switch their status from Active to Draft or Paused
- (WPVivid) Turn off backup schedule

For additional caution, I'm also adding this to my Fluent snippets:
define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true )

\=> although I'm not sure if this is necessary or not.

I've also seen additional advice on sanitizing the userbase, either via SQL query or WP-CLI. Do you think this is necessary?

Am I missing anything?