Getting Started

Introduction
Adding your first site
What happens after you create a Cloud site
Importing an existing WordPress site
Publishing for the first time
What to read next

Introduction

Staatic Cloud provides the best experience with Staatic and allows you to setup your static WordPress site in a matter of minutes.

Every site on Staatic Cloud includes a managed WordPress instance from where you can manage and publish your WordPress site. The published static site is hosted on our highly scalable platform and distributed over multiple regions to provide the highest performance from wherever your visitors are located.

Adding your first site

In order to get started with Staatic Cloud, you will first need to add a site to your account.

Go to app.staatic.com and login with your account details.
Click Account > Sites. Then click Create Site.
Choose Hosting: Staatic Cloud to have us run WordPress for you, or self-hosted to keep your own WordPress. The form starts on Staatic Cloud unless you registered through a self-hosted link. This guide describes Staatic Cloud.
Enter a Name to identify your site later on.
Choose a Primary Language for your site. The chosen language is used both to improve form submission validation and search indexing.
Optionally enter an Initial Admin User which will be used to login to your managed WordPress instance. If you leave it empty, staatic is used.
Finish by clicking Create Site.

While you are on the free trial, the form shows how many sites the trial includes. See Account and Free Trial.

This will start the process of provisioning your site. The status of this process is visible on the site details page and is updated automatically. It should not take more than a couple of minutes for the process to finish.

As soon as the process has finished provisioning your site, you will be able to access your site, as well as your managed WordPress instance.

What happens after you create a Cloud site

You land on the WordPress tab of the new site. Provisioning takes a few minutes, and the tab updates by itself. When your managed WordPress instance is ready, we email you a message titled “Your WordPress instance is ready” with a Log in to WordPress button.

There is no password to copy. The button in the email, and the Login button on the WordPress tab, sign you in to WordPress Admin as an administrator: the initial admin user on a new site, or, once there are several administrators, the one whose email address matches yours. If you need SFTP, database or HTTP basic authentication details later, they are on the same tab, masked, with copy buttons. See SFTP Access.

Until you publish for the first time, your static site serves a placeholder. After your first publication, the WordPress tab shows a Published site row with the live URL and the date of the first publication. For 24 hours you also see a green strip, “Your site is live at …”, with an Open site button.

The onboarding checklist

While your account is on its free trial, the dashboard shows a checklist for account owners and administrators. It marks each step as done by itself:

Step	Done when
Confirm your email address	The account owner has confirmed their email address.
Add your first site	The account has a site.
Log in to WordPress	Your WordPress has reported in for the first time, which happens when you open WordPress Admin.
Publish your site for the first time	A publication of your site has been deployed to its live address.
Connect your domain	A custom domain of a Cloud site is active (its certificate is issued). Shown for Cloud sites only.
Choose a plan	Your account has an active subscription.

To connect your own domain, open the Site tab of the site and follow Custom Domain. To give colleagues access, see Team Access.

Changing the PHP version

The WordPress tab shows which PHP version your site’s WordPress runs on, under PHP image. To switch, open the site’s actions menu and choose Change PHP version, then pick the version. WordPress restarts on the new version within a few minutes. During that time the editing environment is briefly unavailable and a running publication may be interrupted. Your published site is not affected.

Check that your theme and plugins support the new version before you switch. We recommend PHP 8.4 or 8.5, because PHP 8.1 and older no longer receive security fixes from the PHP project. On a multisite network, change it on the main site; it applies to the whole network. Changing the PHP version needs the Site Management permission (see Team Access).

Importing an existing WordPress site

If you already have a WordPress site that you want to move into Staatic Cloud, you do not need to start from an empty installation.

Once your managed WordPress instance is available, open the WordPress tab on the site details page and use the built-in import flow to import a supported backup ZIP.

For the complete procedure, supported formats, and post-import steps, see Importing a WordPress Site.

Publishing for the first time

As you will see by visiting your static site, it awaits a first publication from your managed WordPress instance. Starting a publication can be achieved by following these steps.

Go to app.staatic.com and login with your account details.
Click Account > Sites. Then click on the View Icon next to the relevant site.
Click the WordPress tab.
Click Login in order to access WordPress Admin.
Click Publish within the Staatic menu in the WordPress Admin top toolbar.

Once the publication has finished, access your static site by going back to your site’s details page on app.staatic.com and clicking the site URL within the Site tab.

Note: if you imported an existing WordPress site first, review the imported site in WordPress before starting this first publication.

Note: if you are working with multiple team members, see Team Access for information about permissions and using Login to open WordPress Admin from the Staatic dashboard.