Refreshing staging from your live site

Refreshing replaces everything on staging with a fresh copy of your live site. Anything you changed on staging is discarded, and your live site isn't touched.

It's the button to reach for whenever staging has drifted away from your live site: after you've published your work, after you've abandoned an experiment, or when a publish tells you the two sites are on different versions of Ghost.

How to do it

1. Open the Staging tab in your customer portal.
2. Click Refresh from production.
3. Confirm.

It takes a few minutes and staging is unavailable while it restarts. You'll see the steps as they run: copying production data, removing members and private data, copying your theme, restarting staging, clearing caches.

What you get

Your posts, pages, tags, snippets, settings and theme, as they are on your live site at that moment. Your staff accounts come across too, so you sign in to staging with the same email and password as always.

What's left out

• Members, subscriptions and comments. Staging never holds your subscribers' details.
• Email history. Which newsletters went out, who opened what, and any suppressions stay on your live site.
• Your Stripe connection. Payment keys are cleared, so nothing on staging can charge anyone.
• Custom integrations. They're removed, and staging's API keys are regenerated, so a key from your live site won't work on staging and vice versa.
• Your analytics identity. Staging counts as a separate site, so test traffic never lands in your live site's stats.

Your media library is the exception: staging and your live site share one, so images aren't copied because they're already there.

If the refresh won't start

A refresh can't run at the same time as a backup or a restore of your site. If you get that message, wait a few minutes and try again.