Working with staging
This article is for Site Pro users who want to test changes before pushing them to their live site.
Staging is available on the Site Pro plan. It gives you an identical copy of your site at a separate URL where you can test changes — theme updates, plugin upgrades, code changes — without touching your live site.
Creating a staging environment
1. Open the site you want to stage from your dashboard.
2. Click the 'Staging' tab in the site detail view.
3. Click 'Create staging environment'. SrvBot clones your current live site — files, database, and environment variables — into a new isolated environment.
4. The staging URL appears once provisioning is complete. It's a subdomain of your site, something like staging.yoursite.com, and is password-protected by default so visitors don't land on it accidentally.
Making and testing changes on staging
Deploy to staging the same way you deploy to production: push to your git branch (or upload files), and trigger a deploy in the staging tab. Test your changes at the staging URL. You can also edit the database or run WP-CLI commands directly on the staging environment without affecting production.
Pushing staging to production
When you're happy with your changes on staging:
1. From the staging tab, click 'Push to production'.
2. Choose what to push: files only, database only, or both.
3. Confirm. SrvBot takes a backup of your live site first, then applies the staging changes.
The push usually completes within a few minutes depending on the size of your database. Your site stays live throughout — there's a brief cache flush at the end.
Deleting a staging environment
Staging environments count toward your plan's resource allocation while they're running. Delete a staging environment you're no longer using from the staging tab → 'Delete environment'. This does not affect your live site.
Still stuck? Reply to any email you've received from us, or send a note to [email protected]. A human will be with you within an hour during business hours.