Staging Site and Development

The difference between a Staging site and a Local Dev Enviroment.

When we are working on your site we need to be able to work on it in an environment that replicates the live site.

Here's what we mean when we refer to staging sites and dev environments:

Staging area / Staging site : The staging environment is where we stage changes for you to take a look at and test. We usually lock this down with a certificate. If you have your own staging environment, then we can also use this to stage changes. We would not actively work on this. Only push up our changes to it.

One of the main reasons to have a staging site is also to avoid irreversible damage to your live site. Although you may have backups or an alternative way to reverse any changes, downtime is never good and being able to sort out any problems on the staging site first is better overall for productivity.

Developer Environment / Dev Environment: This is where we mainly work. We require this no matter if you have a staging site already. Dev environments are where the coding is done. Work done here is eventually pushed up to a staging site when ready.

Working locally means we have the speed of working on a machine in front of us, our own tools to get the job done efficiently and we have a lot of automation already in place to make everyone's lives easier. A lot of work has been put into the infrastructure here to ensure client work can be done to the standards our clients have come to expect. This is one of the reasons why the project set up task is so important.