ryanshoover

<p><a href="https://circleci.com/gh/ryanshoover/safe-staging/tree/master" rel="nofollow ugc"></a></p>
<p>Simply define your production url in settings and copy your site to your staging instance without fear. The staging site won’t send any emails and won’t process any payments.</p>
<h4>Why should I use the plugin</h4>
<p>If you host your site on a managed host that provides a staging instance (WP Engine, Siteground, and others), or if you run a staging instance for a self-hosted website, you may have found that WordPress and WooCommerce will automatically send emails and process payments from the staging site. Whenever you clone your production site to your staging site, you would normally need to complete a number of steps to make your site “safe for staging.”</p>
<p>Instead, install this plugin in production, set the production URL, and safely copy your site to and from staging. No other steps needed!</p>
<h4>Features on Staging</h4>
<ol>
<li>A “noindex” tag is added to all pages. Your staging site won’t show up in Google.</li>
<li>WordPress emails are stopped. The site won’t send any emails except for the password reset email. Please note, this feature may not be compatible with plugins that offload email to a 3rd party service.</li>
<li>The WooCommerce checkout page has a warning message notifying the visitor they are viewing the staging site.</li>
<li>WooCommerce payment gateways are suspended. Bank account transfer, Cash on Delivery and Check are left enabled. Stripe is automatically put into test mode.</li>
<li>WooCommerce Subscriptions is put into staging mode.</li>
</ol>


Safe Staging

My client did something that suddenly started sending emails from the staging server for their membership site. This plugin allowed me to kill the emails from sending and backtrack the issues caused before it got out of hand. 

This saved my client

Safely copy your WordPress, WooCommerce, and membership site between production and staging.

Safe Staging vs WPvivid — Backup, Migration & Staging