Highlights → One-click staging → production migration

One-click staging → production migration

April 17, 2026. The staging site you've been building goes live in one click. Pages, posts, design, forms, custom data — promoted as-is to production. The risky-change workflow becomes safe and routine.

What changed

Before today, taking a finished staging build live meant either:

  • Rebuilding the content on production (error-prone, slow, doubles the work)
  • Or hand-copying content row by row and reconciling drift (fragile, slow, error-prone)

After today, the Promote to Production action lifts the entire staging site state — content, design, forms, custom objects, settings — into the live site. One action, predictable result.

What gets promoted

A full promotion covers:

  • Every page and post in their published state
  • The visual design — themes, custom CSS, builder layouts, component overrides
  • Custom data shapes — every Custom Object type and Custom Field configuration
  • Forms, popups, and integration destinations
  • Site settings — SEO, redirects, robots.txt, tracking consent rules
  • The media library — every uploaded asset

What does NOT promote (by design):

  • Form submissions — staging form submissions stay on staging; production form storage is its own table
  • Analytics history — staging analytics stays on staging; production analytics begins on day-one of promotion
  • Active sessions — visitors aren't kicked from production when promotion happens
  • Domain configuration — the production domain stays where it was

These boundaries keep the promotion as a content-state operation, not a user-state operation.

How it works

The flow:

  1. Open Site → Migration → Promote to Production
  2. The platform shows a diff: what's changing vs current production
  3. Optional: take a manual production snapshot before proceeding (recommended for first-time promotions)
  4. Click Promote
  5. The production site briefly shows a maintenance page (typically 30 seconds to 5 minutes depending on site size)
  6. Production loads with the new content live

Visitor-side: anyone on production at the moment of promotion sees the maintenance page until the swap completes. Then they see the new version on next page-load.

Why this matters

The staging-to-production gap is where most platforms lose teams. Either the platform makes staging optional (so teams edit production directly — risky) or makes promotion painful (so teams stop using staging — wasted effort).

SGEN's promotion takes seconds and preserves everything. Staging becomes the place where work happens. Production becomes the publish destination. The two stay in sync via the promotion action whenever the team is ready.

For agency workflows, this means client review can happen on staging without risking the live customer experience. Once the client approves, one click ships.

Common patterns

  • A site rebuild. Acme Coffee Roasters wants a new design. The team builds the new design on staging over two weeks, reviews internally, gets client sign-off. Click Promote. Production swaps to the new design in under a minute. Visitors see no broken-state transition.
  • A seasonal campaign. Pre-build the spring campaign pages on staging. Day-of-launch, click Promote. Campaign is live; nothing was risked on production until ready.
  • An ecommerce restock. Update product pages on staging — pricing, descriptions, photos. Promote. Production product pages refresh.
  • A cautious copy edit. Even a small edit (changing a headline, fixing a typo) can ride this flow if the team prefers the staging-then-promote habit.

What's not in this release

  • Selective promotion. Today's promote is all-or-nothing — the full staging state. "Promote only the blog and forms, leave the homepage alone" is in NEXT.
  • Scheduled promotion. "Promote at 2 AM Sunday" is not yet supported. Today's promote runs immediately when you click.
  • Diff preview rendering. The pre-promote diff lists changed entities but doesn't yet render side-by-side visual previews. Visual diff is in NEXT.

Next steps

  • Use staging. If you've been editing production directly, switch to the staging-then-promote pattern.
  • Take a snapshot first. Before any large promotion, take a manual snapshot on production. Site backups are documented separately.
  • Read the Migration reference page for field-by-field detail on the promotion flow.
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