Staging Websites - Troubleshooting

You can sync a new copy of your Production site to your Staging site at any time by simply clicking the Reset button.

When you push a copy of the Staging site to your Production site, we will automatically make a backup of your Production site first. This helps with fast recovery should you need it.

If you notice valid URLs on your staging site returning 404 errors, go to Settings > Permalinks and click the Save Changes button to refresh the permalinks.

Occasionally, you may get an error message in your Hub saying the staging site creation failed. This can happen from time to time if our system is overloaded with requests. Please try the process again before contacting support.

Staging Resources

Staging uses an incremental clone of your Production file system. This means that it normally uses very little of your storage space. Only new/changed files on Staging or deleted files on Production will increase the amount of storage used by Staging and doing a fresh sync from Production will reset that to zero again.

Object Cache and Static Server Cache are not enabled on Staging sites. This will make Staging sites a bit slower than your Production sites but helps make development easier.

Staging is given limited server resources to prevent it from adversely affecting your Production site. This too can make Staging run slightly slower, and in rare cases cause errors with some plugins that demand lots of resources.

For example, staging sites only have 2 PHP workers (the processes that run PHP on the server), regardless of the hosting plan.

Images Are Missing on the Production Site

After moving your staging site to production, you might find the images missing on the production site. To resolve this issue, try the following:

• If you are using Elementor, make sure to regenerate the page builder assets.
• If you are using Divi Builder, clear the Divi Builder cache.
• If you enabled Smush CDN on your production site, go to Smush > CDN and click the Deactivate button; then enable it again by clicking on the Get Started button.
• Clear your site’s Object Cache and the Static Server Cache.

URL Issues When Pushing Staging to Production

When pushing staging to production, our system will automatically update all URLs from the staging site name to the production site name in the following database tables:

• {DB_PREFIX}blogs
• {DB_PREFIX}sitemeta
• {DB_PREFIX}options
• {DB_PREFIX}*options

If any URLs are stored in other tables, possibly by your page builder or other plugins, they would not be automatically updated, and you would need to take care of that manually.

Replacing URLs with a plugin

Using a search & replace plugin, like this one (https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search-replace/) or Velvet Blues, is an easy way to get the job done if you’re not comfortable with command line stuff.

• Simply enter the URL you want to search for, for example: https://example.staging.tempurl.host
• Then enter the URL you want to replace that with, for example: https://example.tempurl.host

With the plugin method, you can also do a “dry run” first to check and be sure only the changes you want will be made. Then run the process.