Knowledge base
A full copy of your site on its own private address, so an update that breaks something breaks a copy.
Staging is your site — files, database, plugins, content — copied to a separate address that search engines are told to ignore. Change the copy, look at it, and publish it over the live site only when you are happy.
Sites → your site → Staging. It has its own entry in the site's section list, directly under WordPress. Staging copies are available for WordPress and WooCommerce sites.
Press Create a staging copy and confirm. It runs in the background — usually about a minute, longer for a large site — and the Staging screen tells you while it works and when it is ready. The live site is not touched.
When it is ready you get two buttons: Open the staging copy, and Open its WordPress admin. Sign in with the same WordPress account you use on the live site — the copy carries your accounts along with everything else.
Plugin and theme updates, code changes, and anything you would rather not discover in front of customers. Update on staging, look at the site, then publish.
⚠️ A staging copy runs the same PHP version as the live site, on purpose — what happens there is what will happen live. It cannot be used to trial a different PHP version.
Staging → Publish staging over the live site. You type your site's domain to confirm, because this replaces the live site. Take a backup first — the button beside the warning takes you straight to Backups.
On our own servers you choose what to publish:
after a plugin, theme or settings change, because those change the database as well as the files.
comments, is left exactly as it is.
⚠️ Publishing the database overwrites live content: orders, comments and form entries taken since you made the copy are lost. Publishing only one half can leave the site inconsistent — new files against an old database, or the reverse — until you publish the other half.
On some platforms a staging copy is published whole; the Staging screen says so when that is the case.
A staging copy made three months ago tells you very little about today's site. Press Refresh from live before you test something important — it copies the live site over your staging copy, so any change you have made on staging is lost.
Staging is noindex, and has a real robots.txt that disallows everything, so it cannot compete with your real site in search results. It cannot send email at all, so a test order does not email a real customer.
The Staging screen lists your recent staging activity — each copy, refresh, publish and deletion, what a publish copied, whether it worked and how long it took. If one fails, the reason is shown at the top of the screen.
On our own servers a staging copy with no changes for 30 days is removed automatically, and we email you 9 days before it goes. If you want to keep one, change something on it; if you have finished with it, delete it yourself.
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