Table of Contents
When you use Visual Portfolio with a localhost or a staging site, it is not considered as an activation, so the license can be used on the production site.
To activate Visual Portfolio Pro on a live site, simply follow these instructions.
What is a staging site?
Staging sites allow you to work on, experiment with, and perfect your site before taking it live.
Normally, you need a Visual Portfolio Pro license activation for every WordPress installation, regardless of whether it is a live site, development site, sub-domain, sub-directory, etc. However, in order to help creators work with staging sites, there are a number of staging and development domains that do not count towards your license activations.
What domains can be used?
Following is a list of staging/development sites that won’t count towards your license activations – just replace “example” with your site name. Keep in mind that the domain name must match one of the following formats in order for it not to count as an activation.
Hosting services staging environments:
Many hosts provide Staging environments, allowing site owners to test updates and new plugins before they add them to their live website. Below is a list of specifically supported hosting services that provide custom staging environments.
- WP Engine
- InstaWP
- Cloudways
- Kinsta
- GoDaddy
- FlyWheel
- BlueHost
- HostGator
- SiteGround
If your host is not listed here, they may be using a more standard way of creating staging sites, allowing our Standard Detection rules to apply without specific rules (read below).
TLD (Top-level Domains):
- .dev (example.dev)
- .local (example.local)
- .test (example.test)
- .wpengine.com (example.wpengine.com)
Subdomains:
- dev. (dev.example.com)
- test.* (test.example.com)
- *.test.* (example.test.example.com)
- staging.* (staging.example.com)
- *.staging.* (example.staging.example.com)
- staging-[0-9].* (staging-6.example.com)
IP addresses:
- 10.0.0.0/8
- 172.16.0.0/12
- 192.168.0.0/16
If the domain name you’re using for staging/development does not meet the above requirements, you will need to purchase an additional license (or upgrade to a higher tier plan) in order to activate Visual Portfolio Pro on it.
You can also remove the license from your main site, activate it on your staging/development site, and then return it back to the main site once you’re done with the changes.