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 copy and press Create a staging copy. If the page that opens shows the same button, press it there too.
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.

Staging copies are available for sites on our own servers. 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 with Open copy on 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.

What is different about it

A staging copy 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 Security tab, ready to copy and share with anyone who needs to see the work. The password stays on for as long as the staging site exists. If it reaches someone who should not have it, press Replace the password: the old one stops working straight away.
• 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.

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

There is no button to copy the staging site over the live one, and that is deliberate: anything added to the live site since the copy was made, such as new orders or form entries, would be lost, so 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 copy at the top of the staging site's page, or Delete in the live site's Staging copy section. If the page that opens shows the same button, press it there too, then confirm. 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.