What's the difference between a staging site and the ‘Stackstaging’ temporary URL?

Our WordPress hosting platform makes use of both a staging environment, which can be used for site development, and our temporary URLs, which can be used to test a site before the DNS is pointed to 20i.

It's easy to confuse them both due to the similarities in the URL structure.

Staging sites – staging.domain.com

A WordPress staging site, or staging subdomain, is a copy of your main website that is entirely separate to it.

A staging site allows you to make changes freely, expand upon the design and tweak the copy without having to worry about affecting your live site. When you’ve made all the changes you want to make, you can then clone the staging site to live, so that it replaces the live site completely. Find out more about WordPress staging here.

Staging sites always use the subdomain ‘staging’. So, for a site called domain.com, the staging site would be staging.domain.com. This allows it to be distinct from your live site.

Temporary URLs - domain-com.stackstaging.com

Temporary URLs - also known as StackStaging URLs - are an automatically generated URL that our UI provides that allows you to visit the site before any DNS points to us.

This can be used to preview a site before it goes live, or to make sure that all of a site’s contents have migrated over to us before you transfer the domain across.

Temporary URLs use the URL format domain-com.stackstaging.com. Note the dash in the URL, and that it’s not a subdomain of domain.com.

The temporary URL is not the same as a staging environment. It will always reflect what will be on the live site, so it’s not possible to perform work and then “push” changes to the live domain name.

Note: If the DNS for a site isn’t with us and you create a staging site, the staging site may use a temporary URL to allow it to be accessible. This will follow the format staging-domain-com.stackstaging.com.