Adding a staging site to your plan

Staging costs €3 a month, or €30 a year, and you add it from the Billing tab of your customer portal. Where we can show the price in your own currency we do, so the amount on your invoice may read differently.

The add-on follows your plan's billing cycle. On a monthly plan it's billed monthly, on a yearly plan it's billed yearly.

Adding it

1. Log in to your Ghost admin at yourdomain.com/ghost and open the Customer portal link in the left sidebar.
2. Go to Billing, scroll to Available Add-ons and find Staging Environment.
3. Click Continue. The next screen shows what you pay now, prorated for the rest of your billing period, and what your next invoice will be.
4. Pay, and that's it.

We then build your staging site for you. It takes a few minutes, and the Staging tab reads Provisioning while that happens and Private once it's ready. Your live site keeps serving readers throughout.

Staging starts as a copy of your live site, so it opens with your real posts, pages and theme rather than an empty Ghost install. What a staging site is and what you can do on it covers the rest.

If the add-on isn't there

Two reasons it wouldn't show up:

• Staging is still in beta, so we switch it on site by site. That's the usual reason.
• You're on a lifetime plan. Staging is a recurring add-on and a lifetime plan has no recurring subscription for it to sit on, so it can't be added to one. We are working on that as well, but it will only be available after beta testing.

Removing it

Go to Billing, find Staging Environment under Active Add-ons and click Remove.

That deletes your staging site and everything on it straight away, not at the end of your billing period, so publish anything you want to keep first. Your live site, your members and your subscriptions aren't touched.

Add it again later and you'll get a fresh copy of your live site as it is then.