Staging site

A staging site is a private copy of your website: the same files and the same database, at a different address. You apply an update, try a plugin or change the design there first. If something breaks, it breaks where no visitor or customer sees it.

The copy is taken at one moment. After that the live site keeps receiving orders, comments and edits, and the copy does not. So a staging site is a place to try things. It is not a backup.

Where you meet it

• Your hosting control panel. Many hosts provide a tool that clones the site for testing, and "staging" is what they call the clone.
• wp-config.php. WordPress knows four environment types: local, development, staging and production. The line define( 'WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE', 'staging' ); marks a copy. A site with no such line counts as production. WordPress asks hosts that offer staging to set the type on their copies, and plugins and themes can read it and behave differently there.
• Site Health. Go to Tools, then Site Health, then the "Info" tab. Under "WordPress", the row "Environment type" shows what the site reports.
• Settings, then Reading. "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is the box to tick on a copy. WordPress's documentation says it is a request and blocks nobody.
• A store with subscriptions. WooCommerce Subscriptions notices when a site's address differs from the one it was first activated on. It then shows a notice, puts a "Staging" badge beside its menu item, and stops automatic payments and its own emails.

What goes wrong

The copy behaves like the live site. It has the same customers, the same mail settings and the same payment keys. WooCommerce's documentation says other plugins and services may not tell a test order from a real one, and that mail from WordPress, WooCommerce and other plugins may still leave a staging site. "Keep the copy private and quiet" in how to set up a WordPress staging site has the list. The WooCommerce sale readiness checklist shows the payment side.

Search engines find it. Google lists a demo version of a site left open to crawlers among the causes of duplicate content. The Reading setting is only a request, so put the copy behind a password as well.

A push overwrites the live site. The copy's database is as old as the copy. One host's documentation for its push tool warns that sending the whole database to production overwrites it completely, and can lose new orders and new users. Send files, and repeat settings by hand. For a store, see how to update WooCommerce safely.

The copy is stale. A test on a copy that is weeks old proves less. Refresh it before each round of work, then follow how to safely update WordPress.