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Frequently Asked Questions

Using Managed WordPress Staging Environments

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Last Updated: March 3, 2015 11:29 AM

Business and Professional Managed WordPress accounts provide staging environments, which gives you a place to work on your Managed WordPress site without modifying the content your visitors see.

Actually using the staging environment is easy, but there are some things we think you should understand before diving in:

  • Staging environments use a domain we automatically generate for you. You cannot choose this domain name or add another domain to it.
  • You have exactly one staging environment per site.
  • Your staging environment is persistent. We don't destroy and create staging environments for you every time you push to or pull from it. This can explain some synchronizing issues you might experience.

The typical workflow with a staging environment is usually these steps in this order:

  1. Create the staging environment.
  2. Push your production site to the staging environment.
  3. Develop your site in the staging environment.
  4. Pull your staging environment into production once you're done developing it.
  5. Repeat steps 2-4 when you need to develop your site further.

Create Your Staging Environment

  1. Log in to Gateway using your COMPANY_NAME login.
  2. In the section for your Managed WordPress account, click Settings.
  3. Go to the Staging tab.
  4. Select one of the following, and then click OK:
    Option What it does...
    Clone... Cloning creates an exact duplicate of your production environment in the staging environment, including themes, plugins, comments, posts, etc. Everything.
    Copy... Copying only moves across your theme and plugins to the staging environment, which does not include content like comments and posts. It only moves across the stuff you need to see what your site looks like.

Push Production to Staging

  1. Log in to Gateway using your COMPANY_NAME login.
  2. In the section for your Managed WordPress account, click Settings.
  3. Go to the Staging tab.
  4. Select Copy production to staging.
  5. If you want to copy across a version of your production site exactly as it is, select Overwrite content even when staging version is more recent.
  6. Click OK.

Pull Staging to Production

  1. Log in to Gateway using your COMPANY_NAME login.
  2. In the section for your Managed WordPress account, click Settings.
  3. Go to the Staging tab.
  4. Select Deploy from staging to production.
  5. If you do not want to move content created in staging to production (e.g. posts, comments, pages), select Delete content that isn't overwritten during deployment.
  6. Click OK.