Introducing Sandbox Sites on WP Engine

The beauty of hosting over 200,000 of the best WordPress sites and watching site creation workflows evolve over the course of fourteen years is that you start to see patterns.

Patterns emerge in support requests, customer conversations, and developer behavior, and at WP Engine, these patterns have led to innovations like multi-dev environments, bulk site management features, our headless WordPress tools, and more.

Over the last year, we've observed a new and unique pattern: the creation and use of WordPress sites that are outside of the traditional Dev<>Stage<>Prod workflows. These are typically temporary sites created for testing, playing, or early development.

To help our customers better optimize their workflows to meet this need, we're excited to announce Sandbox Sites, a new site type that all WP Engine hosting customers now have access to.

Sandbox sites are the home for WordPress sites that don't belong or aren't ready for primetime. They enable a complete online WordPress experience for those occasions when you don't need to “go live.” Whether for playing, testing, or just in progress-customer reviewSandbox sites give you a place to easily explore.

Turn it up, turn it down and turn it out.

The purpose of sandbox sites is to make them easy to start, stop, and update. Even considerations like “Will this count toward my plan’s site limit?” are removed. If you need a site quickly without having to worry about where and how it should go, Sandbox Sites makes it easy.

Let's take a look!

_{This is a 60-second video tutorial on how to create, delete and promote a sandbox site on the portal.}

A nice landing spot from Local

You may remember that earlier this year we introduced significant improvements to how Local interacts with your WP Engine hosting account.

These improvements work beautifully with Sandbox Sites! Imagine a site you built in Local and now want to deploy online “somewhere.” Maybe you want to quickly share something with friends, colleagues, or customers. While that doesn't justify taking up an entire site slot in your plan, you do want to put it somewhere. Hello Sandbox Sites!

Transferring a site from a local site to a sandbox site on WP Engine

Designed for everyone. Perfect for agencies!

Almost every detail described above screams “perfect for agencies!”

Everyone wants to create a sandbox site in a variety of scenarios, but the real winners here are the agencies.

Experimentation and collaboration are part of an agency's everyday life, and we've seen many of our agency partners cobble together solutions.

As we've been building out functionality for Sandbox Sites over the past few months, we've worked closely with many of our agency partners to figure out what and how to meet their workflow needs. The feedback we've already received has been incredible and much of it has influenced our products today!

Sandbox sites are just the next step among many planned efforts to help our customers improve their WordPress development practices. We're excited to see how you use them!

FAQ

Q: Which WP Engine hosting plans have access to Sandbox Site?

A: All paid WP Engine plans have access to sandbox sites. The number of sandbox sites available depends on your plan level.

Q: Does a Sandbox site count toward my plan's site limit? For example, does it count toward the 10 sites included in a Growth plan?

A: No. Sandbox sites are in addition to your normal site limit. However, they share the resource limits such as disk space, etc. that your plan has.

Q: Can I have a custom domain on a sandbox site?

A: No. Sandbox sites are not intended for sites that go “live” and therefore do not allow custom domains. You can easily upgrade a sandbox site to a regular site if necessary and then assign a custom domain.

Q: What other limitations do sandbox sites have?

A: Sandbox sites do not allow multisite installations of WordPress.

Q: Can I convert or “promote” a sandbox site to a regular site?

A: Absolutely! We know that the biggest and best websites often have humble beginnings. You can easily upgrade a sandbox site to a full-fledged site in the WP Engine Client Portal.

Q: Who can create sandbox sites on WP Engine?

A: All users with site creation permissions in the WP Engine Client Portal where the associated plan has available sandbox site slots.

Q: Do sandbox sites expire?

A: This is not the case at launch. We may add expiration functionality in the future to help our customers better manage their plan resources.

Q: How is a sandbox site different from a dev or staging site?

A: A development or staging environment plays a special role in the more structured workflow that encompasses the development of a site through to launch or production. A sandbox site is designed to be independent of these workflows. It is a space for exploration or collaboration where the site should not be subject to the overhead of a full site workflow.

Visit WP Engine to learn more about our managed WordPress hosting and the tools and themes that come standard with every plan, or contact a representative to get your questions answered.