Why this matters
Has a client ever made content changes to their live site while you were working on significant changes to their staging site? Replicating them on staging takes up time you could have spent elsewhere. Or you could potentially frustrate your client by making them repeat their work.
The client isn’t always right, especially when they have a frequent impact on your chargeable time.
While it shouldn’t be needed, something as simple as multiple hard to miss warning messages during the login process should ensure the client is aware. Or confuse them enough to get in touch to ask what’s going on. Prep that canned response ahead of time.
What it does
Once enabled it will show a CAUTION message on the login screen. This lets them know a staging version of the site is currently active and changes made to the current site may be overwritten. It’ll also show how long ago this status was set. Was it recently or weeks ago (and never turned off).
After ignoring the login screen message they’ll see this pop up in the admin area. Once again WARNING that changes made may be overwritten.
After staying logged in there will be the red “Staging Site Active” message at the top of the admin screens. Just in case they weren’t sure.
ToggleWP includes admin login notification emails. When staging site mode is active the notification email subject will reflect this, so you can filter (or not) these accordingly. Why not pick up the phone / drop a quick email to check in on them. Quickly getting in touch could save hours of hassle later on.
How to set it up
This is best performed on the production site prior to creating a staging clone, however you can repeat the steps on both production / staging when one is already active.
Head to ToggleWP > Manage. Enable the “Staging Site Warning” module then swap to the “Staging” tab.
Scroll down to the “Staging-to-Production Sync” section. Click the button to auto create a sync user and enter your production site URL then save changes.
After creating your new staging site check the “Staging Site Active” setting and save changes. The production site will now display a warning message on its login screen.
