Staging sites on Flywheel

Flywheel's staging environment lets you work on a private copy of your site without affecting what visitors see. It's available on all current Flywheel plans (though not on old Legacy Tiny plans or WordPress Multisite sites), and it's a standard part of how we develop and test changes for your site.

What staging is on Flywheel

On Flywheel, staging is a full copy of your WordPress site hosted at a separate URL. It's:

Password-protectedFlywheel's Privacy Mode means only people you share the URL, username and password with can see it.
Hidden from search enginesPrivacy Mode also stops search engines crawling it.
A copy of your live siteWhen it's created, it has the same theme, plugins, content, and database.
Synchronized on demandYou can refresh it from the live site, or push changes back to live.

The visitor arrow never crosses into the lower box. Your live site is copied from, and written to exactly once, after the change has already been tested somewhere it could safely have failed.

Read this as text

Your live site keeps serving visitors throughout. Nothing in this process interrupts it until the very last step.

Before significant work, we refresh a staging copy from the live site: an exact copy on a private URL that visitors cannot stumble across. Every change, update and fix is made there.

We then test it: key pages, navigation, forms, and whatever the change actually touched. For visual work or new content we usually share the staging URL so you can review it and say yes before anything moves.

Only once it has passed do we apply the same tested change to the live site. So the live site is read from at the start and written to once at the end, and everything that could go wrong goes wrong somewhere your customers never see.

Creating a staging site

Log in to Flywheel at app.getflywheel.com and open your site's dashboard.

Open the site's Advanced tab.

Turn on the Enable Staging switch. Flywheel copies your live site to a staging environment. This can take a few minutes, especially for a large site.

Open the new Staging tab. It shows the staging URL, plus the Privacy Mode username and password (the same ones as your live site's Privacy Mode). You log in to WordPress on staging with the same details as on the live site.

Copying the live site to staging

If a staging site already exists but you want to refresh it with the latest live site content:

Open the Staging tab in your site's Flywheel dashboard.

Click "Reset Staging." This overwrites the current staging site with a fresh copy of the live site.

Confirm the reset. Flywheel asks you to confirm that you want to overwrite the staging site, and to enter your Flywheel password.

Copying live to staging will overwrite staging changes

Any work that exists only on staging will be lost when you reset it from live. Flywheel's nightly backups don't cover staging sites, so make sure any staging work has been pushed live first, or is intentionally being replaced.

Pushing staging to live

After testing on staging, here's how to publish those changes to the live site:

Verify everything on staging. Check all pages, test any forms, and confirm nothing is broken.

Open the Staging tab in your Flywheel dashboard.

Click "Move staging changes to live site." Flywheel copies staging's plugins, themes, code and uploads to the live site.

Choose what happens to the database, then confirm. If you tick Copy staging database to production, the live database (posts, pages, users, orders and settings) is replaced with the staging one. Leave it unticked to push only files. While the push runs, the live site shows a maintenance page.

Verify the live site. Open your website in a fresh browser tab and check that the changes are showing correctly.

Accessing the staging site

If you'd like to see what's on staging before it goes live:

Ask us for the staging URL, username and password.
Open the staging URL in your browser.
Enter the username and password when prompted.

You'll see the private staging version of your site, with the changes we're working on.

Common questions

Is staging included on all Flywheel plans?

Staging is included on all current Flywheel plans at no extra charge. It isn't available on old Legacy Tiny plans or on WordPress Multisite sites.

Can I edit staging myself?

Technically yes, if you have the staging URL, the Privacy Mode username and password, and your WordPress login. However, coordinate with us before making changes on staging. We may be in the middle of work there.

What if I make changes on live while we're working on staging?

Those live changes could be overwritten when we push staging to live, if the push includes the staging database. If you need to make urgent live changes, let us know so we can coordinate.

How long does staging exist?

Flywheel's docs don't give it an expiry date. When you're done, staging is switched off in the site's Advanced tab, and it can be switched on again later. If nobody visits it for several days, Flywheel scales it down, and it wakes up the next time someone opens it. Flywheel advises against leaving staging unpushed for very long, because it makes database conflicts more likely.

Learn more

Flywheel help: Staging on Flywheelgetflywheel.com