How to push updates from a staging site to a live site

If you want to make big changes on your site, you should test these first using a staging environment. This is a copy of your site on your server that allows you to test the changes without affecting your live site. In this article, we’ll explain how to push updates from your staging environment to a live site.

Pushing changes to a live site

There are lots of popular hosting or plugin solutions for staging environments. Although pushing changes from staging to a live site will be relatively similar in all of them, it might look slightly different depending on the solution you are using. In this article, we’ll use the plugin WP Staging as an example.

Make a backup of your staging site and live site.
First of all, make sure you backup your staging site and your live site. Read more about backing up your site.
Start the process of pushing changes to your live site (example: WP Staging).
After backing up your site, it’s time to push the database data from your staging environment to your live site. We’ll use the WP Staging plugin as an example to show you how this works. Go to your live site and click WP Staging > Sites / Start. Select the staging site you want to move over to the live site and click Push Changes.
Select the data you want to push to your live site (example: WP Staging).
The WP Staging plugin allows you to select the data you want to push to your live site. Any selected table or file will overwrite its equal on the live site completely.
Push to live site (example: WP Staging).
Click the button Push to Live Site to start deploying the changes to your live site. You’ll see a green notification when it’s finished.
Reload your website.
Reload your website to see the changes you made on your live site.