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 sites on the Free, legacy Pro, Personal, and Premium plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.
In this guide
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 the staging site was created by another administrator. You can create a single staging site per production site.
To create a staging site, follow these steps:
- Visit your Sites list in the dashboard.
- Click on the site from the list of your sites.
- Navigate to the “Staging Site” tab.
- Click the “Add staging site” button:
If you have already created a staging site, you will find a “Manage staging site” button here instead.
Once you have created your staging site, you can select it from your Sites list, or the drop-down box next to your main site address on the Site Overview page.
Staging sites will show a yellow border and a yellow “My Home” button when selected:
The staging site feature copies your existing site to a new site. The staging site URL is created automatically by prepending “staging-[random-four-characters]” to the production site address. 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.
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.
Your newly created staging site is completely decoupled from the original site; any changes to one won’t impact the other.
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, or 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
The staging site works very similarly to the production (live) site. SFTP, SSH, and phpMyAdmin can be accessed in the same way from the “Server Settings” tab on the staging site Overview page. You can install plugins, switch themes, and restore backups on the staging site, just like on the live site.
You can synchronize the database and filesystem between the staging environment and the production (live) environment in both directions.
You must have access to both the production and staging sites in order 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.
Learn how to synchronize between staging and production.
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.
To remove your staging site, follow these steps:
- Visit your Sites list in the dashboard.
- Click on the production site title in the list of your sites.
- Navigate to the “Staging Site” tab.
- In the Staging site section, click the “Delete staging site” button.
