It’s very easy to set up (they even have password generators now). Preventing access is a more reliable way of stopping crawlers from deciding whether or not to honor your discourage request. Your live website will no longer show up in the search results.Ī smarter and a more robust way would be to completely password protect your website with HTTP authentication. The problem with this approach is that developers tend to forget to disable the Discourage option, so when you clone a website from staging to live, you also clone this setting. If your main concern is Google, this will be enough. The simple solution is to turn on the Discourage search engines from indexing this site option on the staging website wp-admin dashboard (Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility). So, you’ve got a staging and a live website, but you don’t want staging to be indexed. A 100% reliable staging environment needs to be on the same server as the live website. But here’s the thing: Murphy’s Law guarantees that your website server configuration will differ from your localhost just enough for something to break. Most people avoid this issue by developing websites locally, and there are plenty of tools like DesktopServer that make it easier to build a local website. I learned this the hard way when I was a kid, when my first HTML website did not show up on Google search for weeks because I did final tests on one of my domains that Google crawled. Once you make the same change on the live site, it will be penalized. This could be a big problem when you make publicly visible changes on the staging website. This means that, as far as Google is concerned, your website does not exist. Creating a duplicate of your website will cause one of them to be penalized for having duplicate content. Search engines crawl all the publicly listed domains and index the content. This is the most common concern for people who are getting started with web development. We’ll talk about some of these dangers and how to minimize them, so you could make changes to your website, stress-free. So why doesn’t everyone use staging websites? Mostly because we’re lazy and love to cowboy code, but sometimes it’s because we think that the danger offsets the benefit. You can tweak your staging website, perform updates and test new plugins, and not have to worry about crashing your live website. Having a staging version of your website is WordPress maintenance 101.
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