What is a staging site?

A staging site is a private copy of your site where you can write posts, try a different theme and change settings without any of it reaching your readers. When you're happy with it, you publish everything to your live site in one step.

It's an add-on on top of any monthly or yearly plan. Here's what it costs and how to turn it on.

Where to find it

Log in to your Ghost admin at yourdomain.com/ghost and open the Customer portal link in the left sidebar. Staging sits in the top menu, next to Configuration.

That page shows both sites side by side: your live site, and your staging site with its own address. The address is your .mymagic.page subdomain with staging in front of the rest. A site on example.mymagic.page gets example.staging.mymagic.page, and that stays the same even if your live site runs on a custom domain.

It's always private

Anyone opening your staging site gets asked for an access code first, so nothing you're working on is public and search engines can't index it.

To find the code, sign in to your staging site's Ghost admin and go to Settings → Access. It's under "What access code should visitors use?" and looks something like harbor427. You can't type your own code on staging, but the refresh icon beside the field generates a new one.

Share the address and the code with anyone whose opinion you want before you publish.

Signing in

Your staff accounts come across from your live site, so sign in at your staging address followed by /ghost with the same email and password you already use. Password resets and login codes work as normal.

What you can do there

• Write and edit posts and pages
• Install a theme, preview it on your real content and change its settings
• Edit site settings: title, description, colours, navigation, the announcement bar, comments
• Change your routes and redirects

Staging and your live site share one media library. An image you upload on staging is already in your live site's library, so nothing needs uploading twice.

What you can't do there

• Send newsletters. Our staging sites block every newsletter sending, so there's no way to email your subscribers by accident.
• Take payments. Your Stripe connection isn't copied.
• Collect members or comments. Staging starts with no members and signups are switched off.
• Use your integrations. Custom integrations are removed and staging's API keys are new ones, so webhooks and anything talking to the Ghost API won't reach it.

Staging also stays out of the fediverse, and it gets its own analytics identity, so test traffic never lands in your live site's stats.

The two things you'll do most

Refresh from production replaces staging with a fresh copy of your live site. Publish to production sends your staging work the other way.