About this plugin
Staging sites often get accidentally indexed by Google or Bing, leading to duplicate content, keyword cannibalization, and production pages being outranked by staging domains. This plugin prevents that from happening.
Staging Bot Block can:
* Block search engine bots with a 403 response and proper X-Robots-Tag headers.
* Redirect bots (or bots and users) to your production domain when needed.
* Display a persistent warning banner inside the WordPress admin so developers never forget that staging protections are active.
* Support additional user agents through an easy settings field.
Important Notes for Staging Environments
If your hosting platform or CDN uses full-page caching (such as Cloudflare APO, WP Rocket’s page cache, or server-level varnish), cached HTML may be served directly without loading WordPress. When this happens, Staging Bot Block cannot inspect user agents, block bots, or send redirect headers.
To ensure correct behavior:
* Disable Cloudflare APO or create a Cache Rule to bypass cache for the staging subdomain or for Googlebot/Bingbot.
* Clear or disable caching plugins on staging.
* Avoid server-level caching for staging domains.
Once caching is disabled or bypassed, all HTML pages will properly return a 403 for blocked bots or a redirect when configured.