Staging Websites: How to Know If You Need A Sandbox For Your Website
What is a Staging Website?
The staging site is a website QA (Quality Assurance) initiative designed to help you plan, assemble, and test website updates. It's often referred to as a development site, staging site, or sandbox environment. This gives you an opportunity to review major changes before executing them in a live environment. Staging sites can be used during the development phase, or they may be created post-launch to accommodate ongoing updates and support.
The staging site is an environment that mirrors that of the live production environment. The staging site is often on a subdomain of the live site, and provides a QA zone that is separate from the development and production environments. Access to this area is usually restricted to developers, site administrators, and content editors.
A Staging Website, The Perfect Place For Testing
Typically the staging site is reserved for major changes, such as:
- Edits with site-wide impact. In Drupal this may include menus, blocks, views, taxonomy
- Design and layout tweaks, often made by your developer
- Module installation and functionality tweaks, made by your developer
- CMS upgrades, made by your developer
These changes should be made in the staging environment and then deployed to the live production environment. This ensures that the update has been tested to make sure everything is working, without comprimising the experience of the live site. Then, once updates are tested and confirmed as error-free, they can be synced to the live site, where you can perform user experience testing.
Since syncing your live and development site requires help from your web team or IT partner, routine content updates work best in the live production site. This allows you to edit regular content seamlessly, reserving the staging site for more complex administrative, design, and development tasks.
The staging site also works well for training new team members, or experimenting with new CMS techniques that you have just recently learned. It's a great tool for working closely with your web partner in training, maintenance, and updates.
Considering a Staging Website For Your Business
Why you might need a Staging Site:
- You plan to upgrade your CMS on a quarterly basis
- You need to make significant administrative changes on a semi-regular basis
- You need an environment for testing, such as 3rd-party software integration
If any of these sound like issues you face with your live site, consider talking to your website maintenance team about creating a staging site. Or, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.