Does Flywheel provide a staging environment?

Absolutely! Flywheel offers Staging on all current plans.

Table of Contents:

1. Staging as part of your workflow
2. Pushing changes to your live site
3. Getting started with Staging
4. Backing up your staging site
5. Staging Resources

Staging as part of your workflow

Staging sites are fully-featured environments, and can quickly become an integral part of your deployment workflow. Flywheel’s Staging sites have a few important features that make them very useful when testing WordPress sites: Staging supports pushing content in either direction, meaning it’s just as easy to bring your production site into staging as it is to push your staging site out to your live site.

Pushing changes to your live site

Staging sites also give you the option to choose what exactly gets rolled out to your live site. Want to move just the files, but not the database? Easy. Want to move both, and replace the entire WordPress database in the process? You can do that, too.

Getting started with Staging

Staging can be enabled from the Advanced tab of the site’s Flywheel dashboard. Staging sites are then accessible via a staging URL, which you can find under the new Staging tab in your site’s dashboard. Staging sites are always password protected by Privacy Mode, so no one can take a peek at what you’re working on without your permission (and search engines won’t index incomplete, incorrect, or duplicate content).

Backing up your staging site

Flywheel does not currently provide backups for staging sites. If you make changes on staging that you don’t want to lose, it’s best to save a backup of those locally using a backup plugin or by downloading the files via SFTP and the database via our database manager.

Staging Resources

How do I get started with Staging?
Staging best practices
How do I push my staging changes to the live site?
How do I reset my staging site?