Rene Hermenau (@renehermi) – WordPress user profile

Bio

WordPress developer based in Northern Germany. Founder of WP STAGING —
the staging, backup, and migration plugin running on more than 100,000
WP sites.

Building WordPress infrastructure since 2013. Started WP STAGING because
I kept hitting the same problem on client work: there was no reliable
way to clone a WordPress site for testing or migration without breaking
serialized data, file paths, or media references. The free plugin is
still maintained alongside the Pro version that handles full backups,
multisite, and large database migration at scale.

Hands-on with the codebase, writing the docs at wp-staging.com/docs,
and reading every issue on GitHub (github.com/wp-staging). Always
interested in WordPress edge cases that broke a staging or backup tool
you’ve used — those are usually the bugs worth fixing.

“When you touch code, leave it 10% better than before. And write a test.”

Badges

CODE

2 badges

Core Contributor '20 Plugin Developer

PRACTICE

1 badge

Support Contributor '26

POLYGLOTS

2 badges

Translation Contributor '16 Translation Editor '16

Current Job

Founder

Present

WP STAGING

Recent impact

Score weights high-impact work (commits, releases, approved translations, props) at 3x routine activity.

Last 30 days

4contributions

high3

medium1

score10

Last 90 days

19contributions

high8

medium11

score35

Last 12 months

51contributions

high24

medium27

score99

Team focus

Across 3 teams, with no team-attributable contributions in the last 365 days

WordPress releases

Contributed to 4 releases

Time commitment

1 hour per week of sponsored contribution time

WP STAGING

Contributions

Type

August 2026

Aug 03 Mon · 16:04

Plugins high

Committed [3633190] to Plugins SVN:
Update to version 4.9.5 from GitHub

July 2026

Jul 30 Thu · 08:46

Forums med

Posted a reply to Security concern regarding publicly accessible backup downloads, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
This might be interesting https://wp-staging.com/nis2-backup-restore-testing-wordpress/

Jul 27 Mon · 10:38

Plugins high

Committed [3624383] to Plugins SVN:
Update to version 4.9.4 from GitHub

Jul 15 Wed · 20:40

Plugins high

Committed [3609404] to Plugins SVN:
Update to version 4.9.3 from GitHub

Jul 07 Tue · 22:48

Plugins high

Committed [3599643] to Plugins SVN:
Update to version 4.9.2 from GitHub

June 2026

Jun 29 Mon · 20:18

Plugins high

Committed [3590576] to Plugins SVN:
Update to version 4.9.1 from GitHub

Jun 24 Wed · 12:07

Polyglots high

Translated 1 string on translate.wordpress.org.

Jun 24 Wed · 08:39

Forums med

Created a topic, Release Notes for WP Staging 4.9.0, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
*WP Staging Pro 6.9.0 / Free 4.9.0 is out!* 20% staged…

Jun 24 Wed · 05:41

Plugins high

Committed [3584037] to Plugins SVN:
Update to version 4.9.0 from GitHub

Jun 16 Tue · 14:14

Forums med

Posted a reply to Security concern regarding publicly accessible backup downloads, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
Hi Dominik, Thank you for your detailed feedback. We agree with the general security principle:…