How Sites, Staging Websites, and Website Clones work at Pressable

Through your my.pressable.com dashboard you have the ability to add a new website, to clone a website, and to create a staging website. We will explain the difference between the three in this article.

Sites

A “site” is a standard WordPress installation that begins with a default theme and a mystagingwebsite.com URL. You can add a custom domain name to it. It counts as one “site” against your total plan limit.

Staging Websites

A “staging website” can either be created as a fresh install, or created by cloning an existing site. In both cases, the “staging” option must be toggled.

These staging sites are completely separate installs that only uses the mystagingwebsite.com domain, cannot have a domain name added to it, and does not count against your total plan limit of live sites. They are used primarily to test changes and updates.

Staging sites can be synced or pushed to another active site by using the Pressable Data Sync feature. More on Data Sync, and other options for pushing and syncing data across sites can be found in the
Push a Staging Site into Production knowledge base guide.

When working with staging and live production sites, it is possible to set a WordPress Environment variable. Setting the environment variable to staging can prevent some plugin and theme licensing issues as well as Jetpack connection problems.

Converting Sites

If you want to convert a staging site to a “live” site – to which a custom domain can be added, you can do so from your My Pressable Control Panel, by pushing the “Convert to Live Site” button. This site will then be counted against your total site count.

If you want to sync or push a staging site’s content into an existing live production site, we have a guide on how to push staging site to production.

If you want to convert a “live” site to a staging site you will first need to ensure all domains are removed from the install. There cannot be any DNS entries attached to a staging site. Once there are no domains, you can press the “Convert to Staging site” button.

Website Clones

A website clone is simply a copy of an existing site. Clones can be created for a standard site or a staging site.

If the clone is created as a staging site, it will be a copy that cannot have a domain name added, and will not count against your total site limit.

If it is created as a standard site, a domain name can be added to it and it will count as one site in your plan.

If you have any additional questions about how these different types of sites work at Pressable feel free to reach out to our support team.