Duplicate sites behaving different

Hi,

I have taken over a new site and have setup a staging site, which was done by downloading all files from the server, changing wp-config.php to my new settings and uploading to the server in a different directory and running the install. That went fine, all the plugins and themes etc were present.

I then exported all the content from live and imported it into staging but now they’re behaving slighty different in what appears as the home page.

If I activate the default theme the content on the home page is the same. If I deactivate the plugins then no content appears as one of the pages depends on a plugin heavily at a guess.

When you copy the plugins directory, do the plugins keep their settings or do I have to manually update each plugin?

Obviously its hard to debug this but I was just making sure I haven’t done anything silly or missed an obvious step along the way!

Thanks.