How to push a staging site to live without losing orders

You have rebuilt a WordPress site on a staging copy or on your own computer, and now it has to go live. The hard part is not the redesign. It is learning how to push a staging site to live without losing orders, members and form entries that arrived on the live site while you worked. This guide explains why that data goes missing, the ways people deal with it, and how AccessNow Site Replica Pro handles launch day step by step.

Why going live loses data

A staging copy is a snapshot. The day you make it, it matches the live site exactly. From then on the two drift apart. You change the theme, the pages and the settings on the copy, while the live site carries on taking WooCommerce orders, signing up members, collecting contact form entries and approving comments.

After three weeks of work, your copy has the new design and three-week-old customer data. Copy it over the live site in one piece and the design arrives, but every order, member and enquiry from those three weeks disappears with the old database.

So the real job is a merge: the design, pages and settings should come from your copy, and the people’s data should stay as the live site has it right now.

Your options

Replace the whole site with your copy

Any backup or migration plugin can do this, including the free AccessNow Site Replica plugin. With the free plugin you back the copy up to Google Drive or S3, download that backup on the live site and restore it (or pull it straight from the copy, if the copy is online). It works, with Roll back if something looks wrong.

What it can’t do is keep anything of the live site’s own. A full restore replaces everything, so the orders, members, comments and form entries that arrived while you worked on the copy are gone. That is fine for a brochure site where nothing changes between visits. It is not fine for a shop, a membership site or anything with a busy contact form.

Use a tool that lets you choose tables

Most migration tools let you leave some database tables out when you push or import. WP Migrate lets you choose tables, WP Staging lets you untick them, Duplicator lets you untick them in its installer, All-in-One WP Migration has partial migrations, UpdraftPlus lets you choose tables to restore, and BlogVault’s merge picks tables. Leave the orders and members tables out, and the live site keeps them.

This works well if you know exactly which tables hold the data that matters on that particular site. The gap is knowing what has changed: most of these tools don’t tell you what the live site has gained since your copy was made, so you are choosing tables from memory. Some also leave the safety net to you; WP Staging’s own documentation, for example, asks you to back up the live site yourself first. The comparisons further down cover each tool’s strengths.

Use a send built for launch day

Site Replica Pro adds one thing to the free plugin that matters on launch day: sending your copy back to the live site while the live site keeps its people’s data. Before you send, a What changed report lists everything the live site has gained since your copy was made. When the backup arrives, people’s data is suggested for keeping, an administrator reviews the plan before anything changes, and afterwards you choose Keep or Roll back. The backup goes straight from your copy to your live site, encrypted, with no vendor service or cloud storage in between.

Step by step with Site Replica Pro

This assumes you made your copy with Site Replica, so the copy is already connected to the live site and has a complete backup of it to compare against. If not, connecting two sites and backing up a large site come first.

See what changed. On your copy, open Pull & Clone and press What changed. It compares the live site as it is now with your most recent complete backup of it, and lists posts and pages added or edited there, new users and comments, tables that have gained rows (and how many), and files added, changed or removed. Read it: this is what you are about to overwrite.
Get a sending key. On the live site, go to This Site as a Source and generate a key with “Also allow sending a backup to this site” ticked. These keys last one day.
Connect. On your copy, paste that key into Pull & Clone. The connection says Can receive backups.
Back up the copy and send it. Open Backups and press Back up this site. Then, on Pull & Clone, choose that backup beside the live site and press Send this backup. Only the files the live site doesn’t already have are uploaded, in small encrypted batches that resume after an interruption. Nothing on the live site changes yet: it stores the backup, checks every file and waits.
Start the restore on the live site. Open Backups and press Restore to this site on the set that arrived. You get the full plan before anything changes.
Choose what the live site keeps. For a sent backup, Keep this site’s current data in some tables opens by itself with people’s data already ticked: users, comments, and the orders, memberships and form entries of the plugins it recognises, such as WooCommerce, MemberPress, Gravity Forms, WPForms and Contact Form 7. Check the suggestion against your own plugins.
Replace the site. Type the site’s address and press Replace this site with the backup. Your copy is imported into temporary tables while the live site keeps serving visitors, and the switch happens in one short step at the end.
Keep or Roll back. Look at the site properly: the front page, a product, a form, checkout, the admin. Then press Keep the restored site or Roll back. There is no time limit, and Roll back puts the previous site back exactly, tables and files.

Putting a redesign live walks through the same send with screenshots, and Reading the restore plan explains each line of the plan before you say go.

Things worth knowing before launch day

Ticked tables are left completely alone. A kept table is dropped from the job: its rows are never imported and the live table stays in place, including rows written while the restore was running.
Settings always come from your copy. The options table is deliberately not offered for keeping, because a redesign whose settings didn’t come with it is not a redesign.
The suggestion knows the common plugins, not all of them. A bespoke table your developer added years ago won’t be ticked for you; What changed shows it if it has gained rows.
New uploads on the live site are never deleted. Files that exist only on the live site stay where they are, and tables that exist only there are left as they are too. The live site also keeps its search-engine visibility setting and its HTTPS plugins.
Development tools stay behind. Plugins can be left out of a send, so tools that belong on your development machine never reach the live site.
The live site needs HTTPS and enough free disk for the incoming files. If it doesn’t have them, the send stops and says so rather than half-filling the disk.
Multisite: networks can be backed up, but restoring a multisite network isn’t supported yet.

What it costs, and what uses a licence

Sending needs Pro active on both the copy and the live site, but a copy on your own computer (localhost, or an address ending .test, .local or .dev) never uses a licence, and neither does a copy at a clearly staging address such as staging.yoursite.com or your host’s own staging domain. So one live site needs one licence. Until 30 April 2027, Pro is half price for as long as you keep renewing: US$29.50 a year for one site, US$49.50 for up to ten and US$99.50 for unlimited sites (normally US$59, US$99 and US$199), with a 14-day money-back guarantee. If you stop renewing, the Pro features keep working on the sites where they are active; you just stop getting updates and priority support.

How other tools compare

Several good plugins can copy a site onto another, and each suits some people better than Site Replica Pro does. These comparisons cover price, features and where each tool is the better choice:

Get started

Start with the free plugin from the Site Replica page: pull the live site down to your computer or a staging address, and back up, clone and restore as much as you like. When launch day comes, Site Replica Pro sends the redesign live and leaves the orders where they are.