What is a staging site?
A staging site is a clone of your live website, and it provides a safe, private environment for testing and building all sorts of things.
You could think of a staging site as a “sandbox” where you can make changes and see how they’ll affect your website before deploying them to the public.
And just like a real-life BFF, your staging site always has your back.
Why is a staging site important?
Much like in Ocean’s Eleven when our lovable band of thieves practice their epic vault break-in by building a duplicate vault in another location, your staging site allows us to do essentially the same thing (minus the break-in part).
1. Troubleshooting without a timeout
If for some reason your live site breaks when its core software or a plugin is updated, it ain’t no biggie!
We simply copy the live site over to the staging server, roll back the live site to a previous state using a site backup, and then get to investigating.
And it’s all done without causing hiccups for your site visitors.
2. Worry-free feature development
We can also build brand-new features in a safe environment — all without compromising your live site.
Want custom code, a new plugin, or something else super special? No problem!
Building and testing out those new features on a staging site first makes sure that it all works as planned once it goes live.
Do you have a staging site?
If you host your website with us and WP Engine, then you betcha! WP Engine provides a staging server for every site that’s hosted there, and on it is a copy of your website.
That way, no matter what happens, you know your staging site BFF always has your back. 🙌
A WordPress staging site enables you to produce better websites.
WP Engine
Dual laptop image credit: Tai Bui on Unsplash