What is a Website Staging Environment?

Sometimes when you need to make large changes to your website, you may need to be able to make these changes without interrupting the user. In most cases, this is best solved with a staging environment. A staging environment typically consists of extra space on your existing hosting account that allows you to make a copy of your website to modify, and then roll back into the original without interrupting the user experience.

A good example of this would be adding new features to your website. This may require you to install several plugins, get things configured, and then perform testing afterwards – and if you run into any issues, this may interrupt the user experience if you’re modifying the website that’s running publicly.

To solve this, you can make a staging copy of your website, make the changes there, and then “push” the changes from the staging environment to the public environment so that you can roll all of your changes out at once after you’ve tested everything.

How can I get a staging environment?

First and foremost, you need to make sure that your hosting company has support for a staging environment. In some cases, you may not need one, depending on the platform you’re working with. In our case, we’re going to be referring to WordPress moving forward. It is very handy to have a staging environment for WordPress when making large changes. Contact your company to see if they offer staging, or check their documentation for more information.

If you need a staging environment, we offer a free staging environment with every hosting plan for WordPress. Check out the details here.

How does a staging environment work?

In most cases, a staging environment will make a direct copy of your existing website, including both the files and the database. You can then make your modifications on the copy while the live site stays uninterrupted, and overwrite the live site with the updated version once you are completed.

Depending on the complexity of your website, you may be able to keep this process super simple. For the sake of thoroughness, we’ve included a few extra steps.

1. When initializing a staging environment, a copy of your life (production) website is made and is attached to a temporary domain for you to make modifications to. You can then log into the staging environment and complete the next steps.

2a. Once you’re logged in, you can make the necessary changes that you need, such as adding your plugins, redesigning pages, or other changes necessary at this time. You can continue to keep your main website live, collecting traffic and orders.

2b. After you’ve made your changes, you can then copy the order information or any modified database tables with new information from your live site, and drop them into your staging site. It is highly recommended to have a moderate level of familiarity with WordPress if you wish to ensure that orders are not lost.

3. Finally, after you’ve synchronized the order data between live (production) and staging, you can copy the whole website from staging to production, and push your changes to live for your visitors. If planned properly, this can be done without any interruption to live visitors.

There are a few considerations when using a staging environment that are important for you to note:

• After making a copy of your website, your staging website will not update with public changes.
  This can affect you in a number of different ways. You will want to ensure that any posts written, pages created, or orders placed in production are copied into your staging environment, otherwise you may end up overwriting this information when you copy your data from staging back to your live environment.