Staging environments on Webflow

A little off topic but…
The biggest issue I have with hosting in webflow and why I recommend my clients not to is you have no means of testing changes before launching. When you host on the subdomain you can test there and work out kinks, then export and upload when it’s done. The inability to do this multiple stage updating is a deal breaker to users who don’t want downtime or wonky things happening during edits.

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I’ve got an answer that they working on that right now. I guessing it ships with new version of WF =)

True, but isn’t it possible to build in an offline version and then duplicate the site and add the domain when you reach an approved release?

We’re hoping to launch selective publishing very soon! (Staging environment for custom domains using your subdomain).

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Great news! It’s almost like a cms with that functionality alone :smile:

How is that like a CMS? Dynamic content is the real reason for a CMS.

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Of course it is, but I was thinking if you transfer a site to a clients account for him to make updates and changes to my Lorum text he and I could look at the staging site and check the site before publishing. We could also easily make another page or news post. If he is careful he shouldn’t brake the design. Dynamic content that’s the real deal of course.

You know you can do this right now as long as you host elsewhere right?

Yeah, you could make the changes you want in WF, export site, upload via ftp and next time we want to do changes we repeat the steps no biggie =). I just think if I have a client with a WF account it can be a little bit easier to manage it through WF. Or if we have team account with company websiste hosted at WF. Multiple people could make changes and review them before publish.

Please do, that’s what I’m looking for. I can’t create new versions of my site right now and test them once by one by selectively publishing these versions to the same domain name. Must have!

@barnabasnagy can you help me understand your workflow? You can currently stage on the subdomain and then publish to the custom domain when you’re ready.

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Yeah I got that but the thing is, once I edit the current version than that old version is gone right? So in case I want to revert back I will have to find which one of the backups is that version. Which is not easy because 1, some of the backups can’t be previewed and 2, the backups can’t be named so it’s difficult to find the old version by name.

Idially, I could create several versions of the same site and then when I like switch the domain pointing to any of these versions whenever I want to.

This would be important as I’m testing with different website designs and variants and sometimes need to switch between versions.

Make sure to press CMD + SHIFT + S to save with name :)

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That’s a cool little feature I didn’t even know existed!

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Thanks, I didn’t know about it. That will help a lot.

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