Editing a live site is how sites break at the worst possible moment. Staging gives you an identical copy at a private URL where nothing you do affects real visitors.
Creating a staging site
- Open your WordPress service in the dashboard and choose Create staging.
- Wait a minute or two while files and the database are copied.
- Open the staging URL. It is blocked from search engines and protected by a password.
What to test there
- Major plugin and theme updates.
- PHP version upgrades.
- Checkout and contact form flows end to end.
- Anything involving custom code.
Pushing back to production
Choose Push to live and select whether to push files, the database, or both. Pushing the database will overwrite content created on the live site since the clone, so on active stores push files only and repeat plugin settings changes manually.
A restore point is taken automatically before every push, so a bad deploy is two clicks from being undone.