2 questions about staging sites

Hi @jltest !

The first option I can think of for you would be what exists on the web hosting platform where your site is hosted, and you can reach out to your web host’s support team for more guidance on their ‘staging sites’ options. If your web host does not have settings for creating, synching, and managing staging sites, you could search for a plugin that could help with that at www.ads-software.com/plugins.

The second option is to build the site as you normally would but set the ‘homepage’ as a page that has no menu so that navigating to the site, via the actual homepage is not possible. To do this, you build a page with no content that says ‘Site under maintenance’ and the site’s menu is not on that page, and you set that as the homepage. To set the homepage, you’d do that at ‘Settings’ → ‘Reading’, and the option to set a homepage is to the top of that page.

Afterward, you would create another page which would be the actual homepage, and only you, when logged in can navigate to that page, or anyone that you share the link to directly.

The third option, and should be done in any event, is to discourage search engines from indexing the site. To do this, go to ‘Settings’ → ‘Reading’ and from there look for the option, ‘Search engine visibility’ and select ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’.

Hope this helps!

Hi Janmtm,

Thanks for your answer.

i’m ok with your suggestions but I’m asking: i if check “no index” in the options, this will modify it for the prod site when sycing and i’ll have to uncheck it.

Or is there a plugin which take care of it ?

Hi @jltest !

Got it, I understand. Thank you. Usually, this depends on your method of exporting your site (or syncing) from the staging to the production or live site.

The ‘no index’ option is saved to the database, so you’d want to disable the copying of the database from the staging to the production if you don’t want that option ported over in the sync.

Some web hosts have very specific and advanced methods for syncing, so this is where referring to your web host’s available functionality would come in handy.

Syncing from the staging to production may need a combination of automated plus manual steps but the exact method used depends on the staging features in your hosting, and your specific website.

In short, yes that option would be enabled on sync when you sync.

Hope that continues to help. ??