Staging sites in WPCD work a little differently when compared to your traditional hosts like WPEngine, Cloudways etc. Behind the scenes we treat staging sites the same as regular sites.
There are two ways to create staging sites in WPCD:
If you configure your DNS settings for CloudFlare you can gain access to one-click staging site functionality.
You configure DNS Integration with CloudFlare under the WPCLOUDDEPLOY → SETTINGS → WORDPRESS SETTINGS → DNS: CLOUDFLARE tab.
Once that integration has been configured, you can create a staging site under the STAGING tab for a site.
This tab will have a single button on it depending on context.
If a site is not a staging site, the button will offer the option to either:
If a site is already tagged as a staging site, it will just offer the option to push back to live. As you might expect, this “push to live” feature just uses our existing COPY TO EXISTING SITE functionality.
With Simplified Staging Sites there is a pre-defined, one-to-one relationship between a live site and the staging site.
Simplified Staging Sites have a special tag on them that identifies them as such. This means that you can assign different permission levels to them vs the live site – see the WPCLOUDDEPLOY → SETTINGS → WORDPRESS SECURITY → STAGING SITES tabs.
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, with Advanced Staging sites 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.
The process for creating an ‘advanced’ staging site is as follows:
When it’s time to push the staging site back to the live site you 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:
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:
Please keep these additional items in mind: