Setting Up a Staging Site

A staging site is a private copy of your live site, database and all, on its own address. Use it to try a new theme, test plugin updates, or build a redesign without any risk to the site your customers see.

Making one

1. Log in to the Reggio dashboard and open Websites, then the live site.
2. On the Overview tab, find Staging Site and press Create Staging Site.
3. The staging site appears in your dashboard straight away, and the copy carries on in the background. A small site is ready in a few minutes; a large shop or a big media library takes longer.

A site can have one staging copy at a time. It counts toward your plan's website limit while it exists.

Getting into it

Open the staging site from the live site's page, or from Websites, where it is marked Staging. Its address is shown at the top. Log in to WordPress there with the same login you use on the live site, because the copy includes your users.

On our own servers

Most sites we host run on our own servers. You can tell because the site's page has a Password Protection section. A staging copy made there comes with a few protections, because it is full of real customers' details:

• It sits behind a username and password, so nobody can stumble on it. You will find both under Password Protection on the staging site's page. Give them to anyone who needs to see the work, and keep the password on.
• It never sends email. Every email it tries to send is quietly dropped, so contact forms, order confirmations and password resets appear to work but nothing is delivered. Check form entries in WordPress rather than waiting for an email.
• Search engines are told to stay out, so it never competes with your live site on Google.
• It is not backed up or monitored, because it is a copy of a site that already is. Keep your own copy of anything you build there that you could not recreate.

If your site's page has no Password Protection section, it is still on our previous hosting, where a staging copy does not have all of these. Ask us before testing anything there that emails people.

A copy, not a mirror

A staging site is a snapshot of the moment it was made. Orders, form entries and posts added to the live site afterwards do not appear on it, and nothing you do on staging touches the live site.

Taking your changes live

If the staging site's page shows a Push to Production button, it copies the staging site over the live one. Anything added to the live site since the copy was made, such as new orders or form entries, can be lost, so do not use it on a shop that has taken orders in the meantime.

If there is no button, that is deliberate: pushing a whole copy over a live site is the kind of change we would rather do with you. Open a ticket and tell us what should move across. Often the safest way is to bring over just the theme, plugins and settings that changed, and leave the live site's orders and content where they are.

For small changes it is usually simpler to repeat the change on the live site once you have tried it on staging.

Deleting it

When you are finished, press Delete Staging Site on the staging site's page. Its files, database and address are removed and it stops counting toward your plan. The live site is not affected.

Need a fresh copy of the live site? Delete the old staging site and make a new one.