A staging site is a completely independent site from your live site. Making changes to your live site will not affect your staging site and making changes to your staging site will not affect your live site.
That is the beauty of a staging site, you can break it all you want, it will not have any effect on your live site unless you were to push those changes using the 'Push to Live' button.
Create a Staging website using your BigScoots WPO Portal:
Log in to your WPO portal using this link.
Once you’re logged in, go to the left-hand menu and click on My Sites to access your website settings.
Now select the website for which you want to create staging website.
Now, click the 'Create Staging' button on the top right.
You will be given three options. Select the one that best fits your needs, then click Submit.
Create staging and exclude uploads – This option creates the staging environment while using the media files from the live website.
Create staging and include uploads – This option creates the staging environment and copies all media files to the staging site as well.
Create a fresh install on staging – This option installs a fresh WordPress setup on the staging website.
The system will first calculate whether there is enough available storage to create the staging site. If sufficient storage is available, the staging site will be created automatically. If there isn’t enough storage, you will see a warning prompting you to add more storage. Clicking Yes, Proceed will add the required additional storage and then create the staging website. Additional storage costs $5 per 5 GB per month.
Once the staging is created, you will see it listed under my sites section.
Switch to the Staging Environment
You will see, you can now select your staging site from the Staging Environment dropdown:
Pushing to Live
You will also now notice, that once you select 'Staging' from the dropdown, the button now allows you to 'Push to Live' so basically, if you make a bunch of changes on your staging site and want to push them live you don't have to redo them there, click 'Push to Live'.
Warning!
'Push to Live' will completely overwrite your live site. This does not push only changes you've made on your staging site, it completely overwrites your live site with your staging site.
If you were to publish a new post on your live site AFTER you pushed your live site to the staging site, this post would be lost if you decided to push your staging back to live thereafter.
Now onto some general information:
Staging URL:
All staging sites will use our staging URL, for example, our domain is: wpo-test.com
The staging URL will be: wpo-testcom.bigscoots-staging.com
Accessing through Site Lock
We will also automatically lock the staging site, this prevents anyone from accessing your site and prevents Google and other search engines from indexing your staging site. This "Site Lock" as we refer to it is a popup-based authentication which you can find the login for here:
So when you first visit your staging URL, for example:
https://wpo-testcom.bigscoots-staging.com
You will be greeted with the following:
Enter the 'Site Lock Username' and 'Site Lock Password' as shown in the WPO panel. By default, the Site Lock username and password are set to dev / dev.You can also modify this login as well by clicking the Edit icon in Site Lock:
Broken staging or want to start over?
If you've broken your staging site beyond repair or you just want to start with a freshly cloned version of your live site, this is just as easy to do as it is to create the staging site.
You want to make sure the 'Change Environment' dropdown is set to Live Environment since we want to again clone our Live site to our Staging Site.
Success!
You have now successfully created your staging site. You can now break it, install a new theme, test some new plugins, and experiment!
Congratulations! You’ve successfully created a staging environment for your website through WPO.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our team via live chat.
For technical inquiries, please feel free to reach our support team by emailing support@bigscoots.com from your registered email or by submitting a support ticket.