Introducing Sandbox Sites on WP Engine

The wonderful thing about hosting more of the top 200,000 WordPress sites and watching site-building workflows evolve over a fourteen-year history is that you start to see patterns. 

Patterns emerge in support queries, customer conversations, and developer behavior, and at WP Engine, these patterns have informed innovations like multi-dev environments, bulk site-management features, our Headless tooling, and more. 

Over the past year, we’ve observed a new and particular pattern: the creation and use of WordPress sites that don’t belong to the traditional dev <–> stage <–> prod workflows. These are usually temporary sites that are created for testing, playing, or early-stage building.

To help our customers better unlock their workflows around this need, we’re excited to announce Sandbox Sites, a new type of site all WP Engine hosting customers now have access to. 

Sandbox Sites are the home for WordPress sites that don’t belong to or aren’t yet ready for primetime. They enable a complete online WordPress experience for the occasions you don’t need to “go live.” Whether playing, testing, or simply just work-in-progress-client-reviewing, Sandbox Sites give you a place to easily explore.

Spin up, spin down, and spin out.

The intent of Sandbox sites is that they are easy to start, easy to stop, and easy to upgrade. Even considerations like “Does this count towards my plan’s site limit?” are removed. If you need a site quickly, without the overhead of where and how it should belong, Sandbox Sites makes it easy.

Let’s have a look!

_{This is a 60-second video walkthrough of the in-portal experience of creating, deleting, and “promoting” a Sandbox site.}

A lovely landing place from Local

You may recall that earlier this year, we rolled out significant improvements to how Local interacts with your WP Engine hosting account. 

Well, these improvements dovetail wonderfully into Sandbox Sites! Consider a site you’ve spun up in Local and now want to deploy “somewhere” online. You might want to quickly share something with friends, colleagues, or clients. It doesn’t justify taking up a full site slot on your plan, but you want to put it somewhere. Hello Sandbox Sites! 

Built for everyone. Perfect for agencies!

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

Anyone may want to create a sandbox site in all sorts of scenarios, but agencies are the real winners here. 

Experimentation and collaboration are part of the day-to-day experience of operating as an agency, and we’ve seen many of our agency partners patch together solutions. 

As we’ve been building out the functionality for Sandbox Sites over the last few months, we’ve worked closely with many of our agency partners to understand what and how they can solve their workflow needs. The feedback we’ve already received has been incredible and much of it has informed what we roll out today!

Sandbox Sites are just the next move among many planned for helping our customers level-up the way they build with WordPress. We’re excited to see how you use them!

FAQs

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

A: All paid WP Engine plans have access to Sandbox Sites. The number of available Sandbox Sites is subject to your plan level.

Q: Does a Sandbox Site count against my plan’s site limit? E.g. Does it count towards the 10 sites a Growth plan includes?

A: No. Sandbox Sites are in addition to your normal site limit. They will however share resource limits such as storage 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 will “go live” and therefore don’t allow custom domains. You can easily upgrade a Sandbox Site to a regular site if you need and then assign a custom domain.

Q: What other limitations do Sandbox Sites have?

A: Sandbox Sites don’t allow multi-site installations of WordPress.

Q: Can I switch 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 site in the WP Engine customer portal.

Q: Who can create Sandbox Sites on WP Engine?

A: All users with site creation permissions in the WP Engine customer portal and where the associated plan has available Sandbox Site slots.

Q: Do Sandbox Sites expire?

A: At the time of launch, no they don’t. Expiration is something we may include in the future to help our customers better manage their plan resources.

Q: How does a Sandbox Site differ from a Dev or Staging Site?

A: A dev or staging environment has a specific role in the more structured workflow around taking a site through to launch or production. A Sandbox Site is designed to be independent of these workflows. They are a space for exploration or collaboration where the immediate intent for the site is not to be subjected to the overheads of a full site workflow.

Visit WP Engine to find out more about our managed hosting for WordPress and the tools and themes that come standard with every plan. Or, connect with a representative for answers to your questions.