We articulate some devops best practices around managing and upgrading an enterprise website on an ongoing basis. If you are running an “ enterprise” website, then there are a few things which you shouldn’t be doing as they make the site fragile and error-prone.
The staging website is kept closely in sync with the production environment, and is used to review new functionality and content before it is pushed into production.
A key principle to remember in general is that code typically moves from dev -> stage -> production and content moves in the reverse.
If you use platforms like WPEngine, they do this automatically for you: The next step is to ensure that you keep production content very closely in sync with stage.