WPCloud Deploy Documentation

Staging Sites

Staging sites in WPCD work a little differently when compared to your traditional hosts like WPEngine, Cloudways etc.  We treat staging sites the same as regular sites.

The primary reason that traditional hosts treat staging sites differently is to prevent you from using them as regular sites.  If you purchase a 2-site hosting plan, they don’t want you to end up with 4 live sites.

With WPCD, it’s your server so there’s no need to make that artificial distinction between staging sites and live sites.  Additionally, you can create as many staging sites as you like – most traditional hosts will only allow one staging site for each live site in your service plan.

To create a staging site in WPCD you:

  1. Clone an existing site
  2. (Optional) password-protect the new site.
  3. Disable or clear caches on the new staging site

When it’s time to move the staging site back to the live site you can use the Copy To Existing Site feature.

WPCD staging sites usually live on the same server as your live site.  However, you can create a staging site on a different server if you so choose.  But to copy a staging site back over to a live site that is located on a different server you’ll need to follow a multi-step process:

  1. Clone the staging site to another site on the same server on which it resides – this is VERY important because this changes the database name.  If you do not perform this step then you will corrupt the live site on the target server!
  2. Copy the cloned staging site to the same server as the live site. Please make sure that you use the cloned staging site from step 1 for for this part of the operation – otherwise you will corrupt the live site on the target server!
  3. Use the Copy To Existing Site feature after the staging site has been copied to the same server as the target site

Notes

When you push a staging site back to the live site, there are usually clean-up tasks that you need to perform.  Some of these include:

  • Clearing caches
  • Re-creating or deleting caches used by page-builders, themes and some plugins
  • Resetting permalinks

Tips

  • Consider creating a WPCD extension to run your own bash script after creating a staging site and/or after copying back to live.  This script can automate some of the after-push actions mentioned above that are unique to you.

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