Supportsoft Glossary

Pre-Deployment Environment for Testing

You can use a staging site when you want to test any changes made to your website before they go live. 

A staging site is essentially a controlled and private version of your website and it’s going to have all the same functionality as your live site. It is also going to have all the same data as your live site. The main purpose of having a staging site is to allow you to correctly validate that your changes work prior to them being made available to the public. 

Staging sites also act as a buffer zone or testing ground between when a change is created, tested and approved for use by developers or QA personnel (Quality Assurance) and when the changes occur on the live site. This significantly reduces the likelihood that any errors will be made available to a user of the website (public).

Many organisations use staging sites to test new features, update designs and remove bugs. When multiple teams are working on a product or software application, it’s usually essential to have a staging site that all teams can use to verify that their code, tests and documentation are compatible with each other.

A mature (managed) staging workflow will create a stable environment (workspace) where development code will be deployed to and deliver updates to a live site to continue delivering quality products to customers. It provides a way to provide predictable quality (via test and acceptance criteria) as part of a Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) process.