Staging Websites - Setting up a Staging Site

You can create a Staging site by visiting the Staging tab of your Hosting Hub. Simply follow the prompts there to create and access your new Staging site, which is a full copy of your live site. Perfect for trying out new plugins or themes, proofing content changes, and other development work.

IMPORTANT

Staging sites do not have backups and can not be recovered after resyncing with Production. If you are working on a rewrite or long-term design project, consider local development or working from a password-protected Production environment with regular backups. If you absolutely do need a backup of your staging site, create one with Snapshot and download it for safekeeping.

To copy a website to Staging for the first time, visit the Staging module and click the Start button.

This will generate a copy of your live site with a modified URL, such as: yoursitename.staging.tempurl.host. When the Staging environment is created, a hotlink to the Staging environment will be available under the Domain field.

For security purposes, the Single Sign-on state of the production site is not copied to the staging site. Hence, If you created a staging site while the SSO feature is enabled on your production site, you will see the following error when using the hotlink to navigate to your staging site dashboard:

{"code":"invalid_sso_attempt_hmac","message":"Could not validate the hmac of the SSO attempt.","data":{"status":400}}

To overcome this issue, manually type in the URL of your staging site dashboard and log in using your production site credentials. Then go to SWS > Settings and disable SSO, enable it again, then click the Save Changes button.

Adding the staging domain to the reCaptcha setup

If you have enabled Defender’s reCaptcha on your production site, ensure that you register the staging site domain to avoid getting an “Invalid domain for site key” error that blocks you from logging into the staging site.