Staging sites allow you to safely test new designs, settings, and plugins without affecting your live site. The staging overview keeps you in control and prevents data loss.
How do I create staging versions of my website?
Hi, this is Sandra from GREYD and in this video I’m going to show you how easy it is to create staging versions of your website in GREYD.Hub. With that you can easily test new plugins or new designs, new settings, without having to fear that you accidentally crash your website. It’s super easy.
We’re already here in GREYD.Hub. To create a staging version of for example this website, I can either click here in the staging assistant or just click here on “create staging version”. So this is the live website we’re talking about. Now I have two possibilities. I can either create a new site for the staging version or I can use an existing one and select from my websites in GREYD.Hub.
The options are both the same. I can, if I want to, protect the page, so it’s only accessible to users or admins or also only with password. I can then define whether I want to clone the entire content from the live website right away, which is usually what you want to do, except when you already have a copy of your live website for example and don’t want to overwrite it right now. And in case you’re working with an existing site, you can create a backup of the old one if you like to. I’m going to create a new URL, I don’t need protection and I want to clone the content. And it’s just one click or two and then we have a staging version.
Here in GREYD.Hub I can now see these are the settings and options of the live website and I can just change that here to the staging site and switch between those two here. And I can also go here and open the tab “staging”, where I have an overview of all staging connections of my website.
One note before I’m going to change something on my staging version. If you want to test different plugin versions, please make sure that your staging site is not in the same multisite as your live website, as then you cannot test different plugin versions.
I’m now going to make some changes on my staging website. Let’s just change a headline for example. Let’s say “new headline” and publish. If I now refresh the staging version, I can see that here a modification has taken place. So at all times with the staging overview here, you can see exactly what has happened on which version of your website.
I can see that one post has been edited on the staging version, I can get some details here and I would also see if there had been any changes on the live website in the meantime. That way you make sure that you don’t accidentally overwrite new content or edited content on your live website when pushing changes from your staging version.
You now have different actions that you can do. You can always adopt the state from the live site to the staging site. You can also reset to the previous state on the live site. And what I’m now going to do, I’m going to push my changes, which was the change of the headline, to my live version. I can then say, I want to push everything that’s been changed or also just the design, just the database or the media. In my case I’ve only edited a post. I’m now going to push the changes.
That’s it. If we’re now going to visit the live website, we will see that there’s the new headline as well. So, it’s super easy to push changes from your staging version to your live website. And in the overview you can always see a full log of everything that’s been done. In our case that’s just the creation of the connection and pushing changes in terms of the database to the live website.
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