Publish staging to live

What this does

NovaPanel can clone a WordPress site into a staging copy so you can try changes somewhere harmless. Publish to live is the way back: it copies the staging site over production once you are happy with it.

Refreshing staging destroys a copy nobody depends on. Publishing changes the site your business runs on, so this page is worth reading before you use it the first time.

Before you start

You need a WordPress site with a staging copy. Customer panel → WordPress → your site → Staging → Create staging copy. Staging lives on a staging. subdomain of your own domain and gets its own database.

Files only, or files and the database

The dialog asks which you want, and the difference matters.

Choice	What moves	Use it when
Files only	Themes, plugins, uploads and code. Your live database is not touched.	You changed a theme or updated plugins on staging, and the live site has been taking orders or comments in the meantime.
Files and database	Everything, including posts, pages and settings.	You built out content or reconfigured the site on staging and want that to become the live site.

Pushing the database discards whatever the live site recorded since the staging copy was made — orders, comments, form entries, new users. Staging's database is a snapshot from the day it was created, and publishing it replaces the live one wholesale. If your site takes orders, files-only is almost always the right answer.

What NovaPanel does for you

It backs production up first — files and database, every time, including for a files-only publish. If that backup fails, the publish does not happen and you are told why. The backup is a normal snapshot, so you can undo a publish from the Backups page like any other restore.

Your wp-config.php is never overwritten. It holds your database credentials and security keys; taking staging's would point the live site at the staging database, and would sign every logged-in user out.

Nothing is deleted. Files that exist on live but not on staging — uploads added since the copy was made, for instance — are left alone. The trade-off is that a file you deleted on staging survives on live, so remove it there too if that matters.

URLs are rewritten. When you publish the database, every reference to your staging. hostname is rewritten to the live domain, and the site address is repinned, so the live site does not end up linking to staging.

Doing it

Customer panel → WordPress → your site → Staging → Publish to live. Choose files only or files and database, and confirm.

The work runs in the background — you can close the page — and you get a notification when it finishes, naming the backup it took first.

If something looks wrong afterwards

Go to Backups and restore the snapshot taken just before the publish. Its name is in the notification. Restoring brings the files back; if you published the database and need that rolled back too, ask your hosting provider — a restore does not import databases on its own.