Assign a Custom Staging Domain to Your Pressable Site

This guide will show you how to add a custom staging domain to your Pressable sites. This unique custom domain will uniformly apply to all your staging sites. This is extremely useful if you are looking to white-label hosting for your clients.

If you don’t already own the domain you want to use, you will want to purchase one through a domain registrar. Some of the most popular registrars are GoDaddy.com, WordPress.com, and Namecheap.com, to name a few.

Each site will use a subdomain of the custom domain you set based on the site’s name. For example, if your custom domain is “example.com” and the site name is “mysite,” the site’s custom domain will be “mysite.example.com.”

Custom Staging Domain Setup

The Custom Staging Domain feature has been added to the Account Settings within the Company section: https://my.pressable.com/settings/company

You can enter the custom domain in the text box. There are two settings that you can adjust when creating the custom domain.

• Setting “Existing Staging Sites” allows custom domains to be added to all existing staging sites.
• Setting “Overwrite robots.txt file” allows the robots.txt file to be overwritten when a custom domain is created, ensuring all Staging sites will prevent search engines from indexing the site.

Once you’ve added the domain and adjusted settings, click on the Add Custom Staging Domain button (shown above).

Once created it will be displayed with the settings that were selected.

Custom domains are added to existing staging sites if the Existing Staging Sites custom domain setting was enabled when the custom domain was created:

DNS for Custom Staging Domains

When adding a custom staging domain, Pressable MUST manage your DNS. For this, you must point your nameservers to the Pressable nameservers:

You can also find the Nameservers and IP Addresses for the custom staging domains for each site in the Domains section. Clicking the drop-down arrow on Nameservers or IP Addresses will show the specific DNS records that need to be added to point a live domain to the site with the custom domain (when you’re ready for the site to go live):

When a staging site is created with Custom Domains enabled, a custom domain will be created on the staging site following this convention
<site-name>.<custom-domain>

Deleting Custom Staging Domains

The custom domain can be deleted from the Account Settings within the Company section: https://my.pressable.com/settings/company

Clicking on the Delete Custom Domain button will show a pop-up asking to confirm the action. All existing custom domains on staging sites will be deleted and the regular mystagingwebsite.com domain will be used for the staging sites.

When a Custom Staging Domain is applied, the default mystagingwebsite.com domain no longer exists for those sites. When a Custom Staging Domain is deleted, all existing and future staging sites will use the default Pressable mystagingwebsite.com domain.

Premium License Considerations

When creating a custom staging domain, keep in mind that some premium licenses need specific conditions to work on staging domains without requiring additional license purchases.

Certain premium themes and plugins allow us to activate unlimited test licenses as long as the domain contains specific keywords like staging or dev (or our mystagingwebsite.com URL, specifically).

Some examples:

• Elementor Pro
• Advanced Custom Fields

Switching to a custom staging domain may invalidate existing test licenses. We recommend keeping these conditions in mind when choosing a custom staging domain.