Quick answer
Use staging for code, theme, plugin and infrastructure changes; be cautious about overwriting production databases that contain newer user activity.
Good staging candidates
- Plugin and theme updates
- PHP version changes
- Performance configuration
- Design changes
- Deployment testing
Dangerous push-to-live behavior
A stale staging database can erase new orders, comments, registrations or content created on production after the staging copy was made.
Keep external services in mind
Payment gateways, transactional email, webhooks and search indexing should often be disabled or sandboxed on staging.
Where Cloudways enters the decision
Cloudways provides staging and cloning workflows. They are most valuable when combined with a deployment rule that separates code and configuration from live transactional data.