Is Staging Site Counted As A Site Activation


Nope, your staging site, local development site, or tests site won’t be counted as a site in your license.

If you are under a single site license, it should be fine to use your license key in another another site for staging/testing/development purposes as long as the domain matches these:

Here are the Top-level domains that are considered as dev or staging:

  • *.dev
  • *.dev.cc (DesktopServer)
  • *.test
  • *.local
  • *.staging
  • *.example
  • *.invalid
  • *.myftpupload.com (GoDaddy)
  • *.cloudwaysapps.com (Cloudways)
  • *.wpsandbox.pro (WPSandbox)
  • *.ngrok.io (tunneling)
  • *.mystagingwebsite.com (Pressable)
  • *.tempurl.host (WPMU DEV)
  • *.wpmudev.host (WPMU DEV)
  • *.websitepro-staging.com (Vendasta)
  • *.websitepro.hosting (Vendasta)
  • *.instawp.xyz (InstaWP)

And here are the Subdomains that are considered as dev or staging:

  • local.*
  • dev.*
  • test.*
  • stage.*
  • staging.*
  • stagingN.* (SiteGround; N is an unsigned int)
  • *.wpengine.com (WP Engine)
  • dev-*.pantheonsite.io (Pantheon)
  • test-*.pantheonsite.io (Pantheon)
  • staging-*.kinsta.com (Kinsta)
  • staging-*.kinsta.cloud (Kinsta)

And for localhost:

  • localhost:* (any port)