This week’s Ask An SEO question:
“How do you stress-test a staging environment to surface SEO risks before a large-scale launch?”
It is one of the most important questions to answer when considering rolling out new websites, migrations, or significant changes to your live site.
First, let’s look at the difference between a “staging” site and the “production” site.
The staging site is often also called the “development” site, “pre-production,” or another name that is specific to your company. It is a test site that is meant to mirror your live site as much as possible to help developers test changes in a safe, private environment before launching them.
The “production” site is your live site. It’s the one that is accessible to the general public and should be operating as close to perfectly as possible.
There are some instances where developers might deploy straight to the production site without testing on a staging site first. For example, when there is no testing site to use, or there is no way of mimicking the conditions to test without deploying the change to the live site. This is risky to do. If a deployment breaks something else in the code, it could critically affect the usability of the live site.
How To Stress-Test The Staging Environment
As SEOs, it is very important that we test deployments that could potentially impact SEO performance before they launch. Oftentimes, we find ourselves discovering deployments after they have already started to affect traffic and rankings. This is less than ideal, as it can take a while for Googlebot to pick up changes once a bad deployment has been fixed. It is far better to test how Googlebot might process changes before it is able to do so. Mirror The Production Site As Closely As Possible
The most important aspect of the staging site is that it is as close to the production environment as possible. This is critical because it enables any testing that you do to reveal the same outcome as if you had run the test on the production environment.
Any deviations between the two environments need to be cataloged. These discrepancies need to be communicated so that testers know to pay special attention to the areas of the production site that differ from staging. Once the deployment goes live, testers can quickly ensure these areas of the production site are behaving as expected.
Crawl The Site At Scale With Multiple User-Agents
One area that is often overlooked when stress-testing the staging environment is using several different user agents when crawling the site. By using different agents, for example, mimicking Googlebot Smartphone and Googlebot Desktop, you are more likely to pick up technical issues with the site that aren’t obvious on first crawl. For instance, crawling as both desktop Googlebot and mobile Googlebot could show issues with rendering that are only occurring on mobile devices.
Make sure to crawl the site with user agents that are important for your specific industry. If you are targeting Google News as a channel, make sure to crawl the site as the Google-News bot. If images or videos are important to your SEO, crawl as Google-Image and Google-Video bots.
To put your staging site through its paces, make sure to crawl it with a mobile user agent, a desktop user agent, and spoof two search engine bots, e.g., Google and Bing. This way you are getting good coverage of the experiences of different, important bots. If possible, try to crawl as an LLM bot also. Check The Rendering
A good starting point when testing a staging environment before a large-scale deployment is rendering. Modern websites will often use a lot of JavaScript,…