Before your site is connected to a custom domain, you can freely create page groups, add directories and locators, and make layout changes — nothing is publicly visible because your site points to a placeholder domain.
After your site is live on a production domain, any page group you create triggers a deployment that publishes to your live domain immediately. A staging environment lets you make changes safely on a separate URL and promote to production only when you're ready.
When to Use Staging
Use staging when you need to:
- Launch new page groups — Build intent pages, coming soon pages, or a new location type without disrupting your live site.
- Add new locales — Translate content for additional markets and promote to production after review.
- Test library updates — Adopt a new library version and validate changes before pushing them to production.
If you only need to modify a layout or update global styles, staging is unnecessary. Make those changes directly in production and use Preview Changes to validate them before publishing — layout and styling changes do not go live until you explicitly click Publish.
Create a Staging Environment
- Navigate to Pages > [Your Site] > Site Configuration.
- Click Create Staging Environment.
The system deploys a full copy of your site to a staging domain. This may take a few minutes. After setup, use View Staging Environment and View Production Environment to toggle between the two as you work and review your changes.
Important: While a staging environment is active, you can still make changes to your production environment — but those production changes cannot be merged back into staging. Work flows one direction: staging promotes to production.
Promote to Production
After your staging changes are complete and fully QA'd:
- Navigate to Pages > [Your Site] > Site Configuration.
- Click Publish to Production.
Important: This action completely replaces your existing production site with the staging environment content and cannot be undone. Publishing to production also deletes the staging environment — you'll need to create a new one if you want to use staging again.