Content Staging is a development environment that allows you to redesign or create staged pages, before publishing them to your production site. Content Staging is available in HubSpot accounts as a website add-on (Site Pages).
For Content Staging, Navigate to Marketing > Website > Landing Pages or Website Pages. In the left side-bar, click the More Tools drop-down menu and select Content Staging.
I asked HubSpot support some questions regarding content staging, the answers to which are as follows:
1. Do you have a step-by-step guide to redesigning a website on HubSpot COS?
– Here’s a step-by-step guide to using content staging: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/website-user-guide/how-to-redesign-and-relaunch-your-site-with-content-staging. We do not have any step-by-step guides on doing the designing, but we do have designer’s documentation available here and a forum for designing available here.
2. When should content staging be used?
– Content staging is most useful when trying to overhaul an entire website, but still useful when working on a singular page. Instructions for pushing this out can be found in the guide to https://knowledge.hubspot.com/website-user-guide/how-to-redesign-and-relaunch-your-site-with-content-staging.
3. How to revert from new design to existing design?
– When a staged page (page A below) goes live and replaces a previously existing page (page B below), that page will be archived. To revert back to the old page, you’ll need to do a few things:
• Unarchive the archived page (page B)
• Unpublish the live page (page A)
• Change the URL of page A to an unused URL
• Change the URL of page B to what it needs to be
• Publish page B
4. How can we retain page-level analytics when launching a webpage via staging?
– This is not currently possible in HubSpot.
5. When should we not use staging?
– As mentioned earlier, staging is most useful when editing a bunch of pages at once, but when trying to redesign a singular page, I’ve personally found simply using drafts to be easier.
6. What is the problem if we do not use staging for a website redesign, for example, when we just make pages in the draft?
– The more pages you are redesigning, the more URLs you will need to update when pushing the new pages live when not using content staging. Updating URLs of live pages and pushing draft pages to those URLs can get tedious if there are a lot of pages to push out.
If you have any doubt, please feel free to share in the comments section. I would like to learn from you.
If you would like to know more about my work on HubSpot COS, please look up the links below.
