Using Your License on a Staging or Development Site

Staging, development, and local copies of your site do not count toward your license's site limit. You can activate your license on them, and every feature works exactly the same as it does on your live site. Only your live site uses up an activation.

For that to work, WordPress has to know the site is a copy. Most of the time it already does and you do not have to set anything up.

Most staging and local sites are recognized automatically

Two things can mark your site as a copy, and either one is enough.

The first is the environment type WordPress reports. Many managed hosts set this for you on their staging environments, and local development tools like LocalWP set it on local sites.

The second is the site address. These addresses are commonly recognized without any setup:

• Addresses ending in .local, .test, or .dev
• Addresses that start with dev. or staging-
• localhost, or a site running on a private IP address
• Staging addresses from hosts like WP Engine, Flywheel, Kinsta, Cloudways, InstaWP, GoDaddy, and Bluehost

This list gets updated over time, so treat it as a general guide rather than a complete one. If your staging site uses one of these, you are already covered and there is nothing to set up.

Setting the environment type yourself

If your staging site runs on a regular domain name, something like staging.yoursite.com or yoursite-test.com, it may not be recognized. You can tell WordPress what kind of site it is directly.

1. Open your site's wp-config.php file
2. Add this line above the /* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */ comment:

define( 'WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE', 'staging' );

1. Save the file

WordPress accepts four values: production, staging, development, and local. If nothing is set, WordPress assumes the site is production.

When you copy a site, the copy usually keeps the original site's wp-config.php. If you cloned your live site, that file still says production, or says nothing at all, so it is worth checking every time you make a new copy.

Add the environment type before you activate your license

The order matters, because a site is marked as a copy at the moment its license is first activated there. If you activate the license first and add WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE afterward, the site stays counted as a regular site. Deactivating and reactivating the license will not change it.

Add the line to wp-config.php first, then activate your license.

If you already activated your license on a staging site before setting this up, get in touch and I can clear that activation for you.

When you clone your live site to a new address

Conversion Bridge notices when your site address changes and activates your license for the new address on its own. You will see a notice in your WordPress admin letting you know it happened, so you do not have to enter your license key again on the copy.

Tracking is turned off on non-production sites by default

Conversion Bridge also stops sending analytics and conversion data from development, staging, and local sites, which keeps test traffic out of your real reports. You will find this under Settings → Conversion Bridge → Options in the Disable all tracking by environment setting.

If you need to see tracking on a staging site while you test, Tracking Not Showing on My Site covers how to turn it back on temporarily.

Setting your license key in wp-config.php

If you rebuild your staging site often, you can put your license key in wp-config.php so you do not have to enter it again each time:

define( 'CONVERSION_BRIDGE_LICENSE_KEY', 'your-license-key' );

Conversion Bridge picks it up and activates the license without anyone visiting the settings page.