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Staging sites and development environments are clones of your live website. They enable you to make and test changes before they go into production and are visible on the live site. In this help article, we’ll cover how to use a staging site or development environment with Memberful.

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Use a staging site or development environment

Memberful can be used with a staging site or development environment. You can keep a staging site password-protected while testing theme or design changes. To test Memberful syncing and member access, the site must be accessible without a password. Remove the password requirement and disconnect / reconnect the plugin. Memberful’s paywall still protects restricted content when the site is accessible without a password. To discourage search engines from indexing your staging site, go to Settings → Reading in WordPress and enable Discourage search engines from indexing this site. This setting asks search engines not to index the site.
Memberful uses webhooks to send member and subscription data to WordPress. Local-only sites, such as those running on localhost, Local, MAMP, or DDEV, can’t receive these updates. Use an internet-accessible staging site.

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Use a live site and a staging site or development environment

Only one website can be linked to a single Memberful account. If you have a staging site or a development environment, as well as a live site, we recommend that you set up a second Memberful account for your staging site and leave it permanently in test mode.
Members already in your Memberful account get a WordPress user account when they first sign in to your site. Members who sign up, or who you add or import after connecting the plugin, get one right away. The Run manual sync button in WordPress under Settings → Memberful syncs plans and downloads only, not members.

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Move from a staging site to a live site

When you connect the Memberful WordPress plugin on your staging site to your Memberful account, Memberful stores the location of your site so that we can automatically and continually sync subscription data to the WordPress user. After you move to your live site, disconnect/reconnect the plugin so your Memberful account knows where the new site is located and update your redirect settings to reflect any changes to the URLs. When you “go live” and connect Stripe, we’ll purge all your Memberful test members and orders. At this point, we suggest that you delete any test users from your WordPress site.