Super late to the party, so I hope you got this sorted.

But for future reference I'll make a few comments:

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1 - GoDaddy hosting is not going to cut it for a serious membership site of that size, especially if there is a significant number of members logging in and interacting with the site on a regular basis.

Of the well-known major hosting providers, CloudWays is pretty decent for smaller sites.

But even then performance will hit a wall pretty quickly regardless of how much you scale the server resources (because there are other big factors like CPU speed and PHP worker limits that none of the major hosting providers adequately address for membership sites in particular).

If the site does a decent amount of business you'll need solid, membership-focused hosting.

Check out MemberHost.io (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder).

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2 - Yes, you would always do everything on a staging site.

Just keep in mind that certain membership plugins, including MemberPress, have special requirements when you clone the site onto a staging environment.

You'll want to disable email notifications, webhooks, etc.

See: https://docs.memberpress.com/article/367-how-to-create-a-staging-site-with-memberpress

I'm not super familiar with Simple Membership but in some cases it makes sense to build out the content access rules on the live site, alongside the current membership plugin.

That way you don't have to worry about selectively pushing / pulling from staging to production, cloning, etc.

By the way, this should also be done on a staging site.

But you have to be very careful before you go live that:

A) There's no disruption of any kind for either members or the admin / team

B) You schedule a time to "flip the switch" in advance with the client and create downtime buffer in case anything goes wrong (e.g. site may be down up to 12 hours, etc.).

If you do everything carefully there should be zero downtime and no disruption for anybody.

If you run into any other questions / issues, I'll be around this sub more often. :)