How do I push my staging changes to the live site?

All right, you’ve made your changes to staging, confirmed that everything’s running well and looking good, and you’re ready to go live with your shiny new edits. This is the exciting part, but it’s also a little tricky. Don’t worry, we’re here to help!

When you’re ready to push the changes from your Staging site to the live production site, start by clicking the “Move staging changes to live site” button in the Staging tab of the site’s Flywheel dashboard. Don’t fret – it won’t happen right away. First you’ll see this pop-up, giving you some options and asking for confirmation:

The “Copy staging database to production” checkbox is the most important (and maybe the most confusing), so we’ll go a little more in-depth on that here.

If you check this box, your live production site’s database will be completely overwritten with the staging site’s database. Otherwise, if you leave it unchecked, the database of the live production site will be left untouched and will retain all of its current data; only file changes will be copied from staging.

It can be a little tricky to understand the difference, so here’s a quick guide to what will happen in both cases:

If the difference between what’s included in the site’s files and what’s included in the database is still a little confusing, maybe this will help: essentially, if it’s anything you could potentially save on your computer and/or access via FTP, it’s a file. Otherwise, if it’s something you click, check, select, or build within WordPress itself, it’s probably stored in the database. So a plugin itself is a file (or a collection of files), but the specific configuration options and settings for that plugin are stored in the database.

There’s no middle ground between overwriting the live production site’s database with staging and leaving it untouched. There is no way to simply merge the two databases automatically using staging at this time. There are, however, a number of plugins and tools available for this process, including WordPress’s built-in import/export feature.