Skip to content

Gorilla Staging Guard

A staging site is a copy of your live site, and it carries the whole database with it: your customers, your payment settings, your scheduled tasks. Whether your host, a plugin or you made it (a local site, a clone or a restored backup counts too), it can email those customers, charge their cards, run renewals and show up in search results as if it were the real shop.

Gorilla Staging Guard stops that on every staging site, and leaves your live site alone.

What a staging site can no longer do

  • Email your customers. WordPress's email is stopped and reported as sent, so forms and orders still work for testing. The plugin names any mailer it cannot stop.
  • Take real payments through the gateways it knows: Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, Square, Authorize.Net and POLi run in test mode.
  • Run your automations. Scheduled tasks and WooCommerce actions pause, WooCommerce Subscriptions renewals are not charged and webhooks are not delivered.
  • Contact the live site through WordPress's own connections.
  • Be listed by search engines. Search engines are asked not to list it, and WordPress offers no sitemap.

A label in the admin bar ("Env: Staging", "Env: Production") shows you which site you are on.

Each protection is explained in What it stops.

Safe for the live site

On the live site the plugin stops nothing. It never treats the live site as a staging site because of its address alone: a site it is not sure about is asked about, never blocked, and until you answer it sends email and takes payments as usual.

Nothing the plugin forces on a staging site is saved. If you push a staging site back over the live site, the live site still emails, charges and runs its tasks as before.

Proof, not promises

The Status tab runs a self-test: it asks each protection what it would do with a harmless test message, payment setting or task, and shows the answer. On the live site, "What would a staging site do?" runs the same test without changing anything. The Activity tab lists what was stopped. See The Status tab.

Free, with no account

No sign-up, no upsell, no outside service. The plugin makes no requests of its own and sends nothing anywhere.

Requirements

  • WordPress 6.4 or later
  • PHP 7.4 or later
  • Single sites and multisite networks

Next step

Getting started: install it, tell it which site is which and check that it works.