Staging Sites

A staging site is a private copy of your live WordPress.com site used for testing changes before making them public. It lets you safely experiment with new themes, plugins, content, or design updates without affecting your live site. This is especially useful for troubleshooting issues, previewing major updates, or collaborating with others in a controlled environment. Once you’re satisfied with the changes, you can sync them to your live site with confidence.

This guide will show you how to create a staging website on WordPress.com and check out the video below for a brief overview.

How staging sites work

The staging site feature creates a duplicate of your existing site on a separate, private site. The new site’s address will begin with staging-, followed by four random characters and your original site address. It will look something like this:

Your newly-created staging site is completely decoupled from the original site; any changes to one won’t impact the other.

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.

On WordPress.com, you can create one staging site for each production site on a Business or Commerce plan. Staging sites can be deleted and recreated as needed.

Data copied to a staging site

Nearly all of your production site’s data, including configuration settings, API keys, and database content, is copied to your staging site. However, some WordPress.com-specific features are not included because they are unique to the original site:

• Subscribers
• Likes
• Attached SSH keys

Staging site features

The staging site works similarly to the production site. SFTP/SSH and phpMyAdmin can be accessed in the same way at Settings → Hosting Configuration. You can install plugins, switch themes, and restore backups on the staging site, just like on the live site.

Search engine behavior

By default, search engines will be blocked from indexing your staging site. However, this behavior can be overridden with a custom robots.txt file placed in the root folder of your website.

Next steps

The following sections will guide you through setting up a staging site on WordPress.com, synchronizing data between sites, and more.

• Create and Delete a Staging Site
• Synchronize Staging and Production
• Switch to the Latest WordPress Beta Version
• Frequently Asked Questions