Before we begin...

Your 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.

That being said, let's get started...

Log into https://wpo.bigscoots.com/ and click on 'Site Details'.

On the next screen, click on the domain you want to create a staging site for. In our example, we will use 'mydedicatedservers.com'.

From here it's just a simple click of a button:

If you do not already have a staging site, you will notice the Staging Environment is not clickable in the dropdown.

After you create the staging site, you will be able to actively select that from the dropdown to switch the environment over to the staging site.

Once the staging site has completed, you will be alerted in the notifications dropdown, also please note the staging process can take several minutes or even longer depending on how large your live site is.

You will see, you can now select your staging site from the Staging Environment dropdown:

You will also now notice, 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 now push them live so you don't have to redo them there, click 'Push to Live'.
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​*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 staging, this post would be lost if you decided to push your staging back to live there after.

All staging sites will use our staging URL, for example our domain is: mydedicatedservers.com
The staging URL will be: mydedicatedserverscom.bigscoots-staging.com
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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 it here:

So when you first visit your staging URL, example:
​https://mydedicatedserverscom.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. You can also modify this login as well by clicking the Edit icon in Site Lock:

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 it set to Live Environment since we want to again clone our Live site to our Staging Site.

That being said, you now have successfully created your staging site, break it, install a new theme, test some new plugins, experiment!