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 sites on the Free, legacy Pro, 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 at a time per production site.

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, 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

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.

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.