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:
Step #1:
Log into https://wpo.bigscoots.com/ and click on 'My Sites'.
Step #2:
On the next screen, click on the domain you want to create a staging site for.
In our example, we will use 'help.learn-wpo.com'.
Step #3:
Next, click the 'Create Staging' button on the top right.
Step#4:
Our WPO platform will now calculate if your server plan has enough storage to create the staging site.
If storage is not sufficient, you will be prompted with on-screen instructions on how to upgrade your storage or cancel the staging process. Additionally, you can contact our support team for assistance.
Notes:
If you do not already have a staging site, you will notice the Staging Environment is not clickable in the dropdown.
If you already have a staging site, the "Create Staging" button will instead say "Push to Staging", which will push your current live site to the staging site, overwriting any data on your already created staging site.
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 been completed, you will be alerted in the notifications dropdown, note that the staging process can take several minutes or even longer depending on how large your live site is.
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: help.learn-wpo.com
The staging URL will be: help.learn-wpocom.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://help.learn-wpocom.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:
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!