Hi Steve–
Yes, I do think this a good work-around. I used WP Staging to create the staging site, applied a new theme and made a bunch of changes. Then I used WP Clone to create a backup and then restored that backup to the main site. The first attempt to restore did not go through (I think there was a timeout error or something like that), but then it worked like a charm on the 2nd try. Deactivating the WP Staging plugin as Rene said did resolve my issues as well. Hope this helps!
–Lori
