Working with WP Engine Staging Sites: What You Need to Know
I love free things. From t-shirts to meals to beer, I love free stuff. I also love that WPEngine is offering free unlimited staging to freelancers and agencies via their Developer Program.
Here’s how it works.
Step 1
Apply to join the developer program.
If you’re approved, you’ll get free WPEngine Personal account ($29/mo value). Typically this would come with staging for the 1 live site on your personal account, but with the developer program, you get as many staging sites as you want.
Note that these are password-protected WordPress installs (the staging sites, not your 1 live site). Flywheel does the same thing and this bugs me because it makes it difficult to work with certain deployment tools or use 3rd party sites for performance testing. WPEngine does at least offer nice speed performance tools that will work with staged sites. I get why they use password protection, but let the record reflect my annoyance.
Step 2
Create a brand new site: Spin up a new site in your WPEngine dashboard and get to work for your client.
OR migrate an existing client site: Same as with a brand new site, spin up a new install. Then use the WP Engine migration plugin to move a new customer’s site into your free account. All the customer needs to do is give you /wp-admin access and then you can use the plugin to move the site.
There’s also “site migration” link in your dashboard you can use to get all the credentials you’ll need for migrating the site. That’s a nice touch to have that info in one spot for easy access.
Step 3
Add free SSL. Use Git Push. Run performance tests. Make an awesome website.
Step 4
When you’re ready to launch…
Within the WP Engine portal, you can select to “transfer the site” to any email address you’d like. If your client is an existing WP Engine customer, they can “accept” the transfer via a link in a confirmation email. Non-WP Engine customers can sign up for a new account and have the site you built for them automatically transferred. Existing customer or not, it’s a pretty hassle-free experience for your client (which makes you look awesome)/
WP Engine will also co-brand notification emails with your logo and can automatically insert your affiliate link for new customer sign-ups (Did I mention WP Engine pays a minimum of $200 per referral?).
And if your client doesn’t want to host with WPEngine for some reason? You can transfer client sites to 3rd party hosts using typical FTP workflows.
Get 10% Discount On WPEngine Hosting For WordPress