Create a staging site

Use a staging site to clone your entire WordPress.com site. You can test significant theme and plugin updates, incompatibilities, or any other major changes on the staging site before applying them to your main (“production”) site. This guide will show you how to create a staging site on WordPress.com.

This feature is available on sites with the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans. If you have a Business plan, make sure to activate it. For free sites and sites on the Personal and Premium plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.

A staging site can be created by any administrator on your site. The site owner will always be added as the owner of the staging site, even if another administrator created the staging site. You can create one staging site per production site, and delete and recreate the staging environment as needed.

To create a staging site, follow these steps:

1. Visit your Sites list in the dashboard.
2. Click the ⋮ button to the right of the site and select Settings.
3. At the top of the screen, click the “Add staging site” button. This process will take some time to complete.

Once you have created your staging site, you have a couple of ways you can access the staging site:

• When you visit your Sites list, your staging site will be listed with a tag “Staging” next to the site name and “Staging site” in the plan name column.
• When you’re on your production site’s hosting overview (by clicking the site title in the Sites list), you can switch between production and staging using the drop-down next to the site address.

If you are unable to create a staging site (for example, the button to create the site is grayed out) the most common cause is a connection issue with Jetpack. Learn how to resolve the most common Jetpack errors.

The staging site is a copy of your existing site used for testing purposes. You can install plugins, switch themes, and restore backups on the staging site, just like on the live site. Your newly created staging site is completely decoupled from the original site, so any changes to one won’t impact the other.

The staging site address (URL) is created automatically by prepending staging-[random-four-characters] to the production site address. Every time you delete and create a new staging site, the random four-character string changes, so the staging URL will not remain the same.

It’s not possible to edit this address or add a custom domain because a staging site is not intended to be used as a live site. To make a copy of your site intended for public viewing, follow the steps in our Copy a Site guide instead.

A staging site will have the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE=staging constant added to the wp-config.php file, which some plugins may use to differentiate production and staging environments.

The staging site will remain active as long as your production site (i.e., your main, live website) has an active plan. The production and staging sites share the same storage allocation, and storage is split 50/50 between the two.

The following site-specific data is cloned to your staging site:

• Posts
• Pages
• Themes
• Plugins
• Media uploads
• Users
• Configuration options, API keys, and any database data stored with your site.

The following WordPress.com-specific data isn’t copied to your new site because these features are site-specific:

• Subscribers
• Likes
• Attached SSH keys

You can synchronize the database and file system between the staging environment and the production (live) environment in both directions. This is useful if you have made changes on the staging site that you wish to apply to your production site without recreating them manually. Visit our guide to learn how to synchronize between staging and production.

You must have access to both the production and staging sites to sync changes between them. If a user has access to one but not the other, add them as an admin to both production and staging so they can sync changes.

By default, search engines will be blocked from indexing the staging site. However, this behavior can be overridden with a custom robots.txt file placed in the root folder of your website.

There are important considerations for staging sites when WooCommerce is used on the site. (Click to expand).

All WooCommerce data in the database will be cloned to the staging site, which will include customers, products, orders, and any other WooCommerce-related information stored in the database. We will also add the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE=staging constant to the wp-config.php file, which some plugins may use to differentiate production and staging environments.

Proceed with extra caution when syncing from staging to production, as it may result in permanent data loss if not completed correctly. With staging sites, there is a risk that you may permanently lose this data (such as orders and customer details) when you replace the production site with the staging version.

To avoid losing important data, consider alternatives to syncing the staging site to production, such as:

• If you made small changes to the theme on your staging site, consider manually making the changes again on the production site.
• If you have added new pages, posts, or products to the staging site, consider exporting them from the staging site and importing them to production.

If you need to sync a staging site to production for a WooCommerce store, consider temporarily pausing new orders to prevent data conflicts. Before syncing, carefully check that all orders, products, and customer data match between the staging and production sites. If there are any differences, export the latest data from production and import it into the staging site. Once everything is aligned, double-check the data before proceeding with the sync.

If something goes wrong and data is lost during the sync, you can restore your production site from a backup taken before the sync was performed.

To remove your staging site, follow these steps:

1. Visit your Sites list in the dashboard.
2. Click on the staging site title in the list of your sites.
3. Navigate to the Settings tab.
4. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Delete button

Once you delete a staging site, you can create a new one at any time. The new staging site will always start as a fresh clone of your current production site.