Hello, I apologize for the confusion you’re experiencing with Rank Math redirections on your staging site.
Regarding the redirection hits on your staging site, it’s important to note that Rank Math treats your staging site as a separate entity from your live site. The redirection hits on your staging site should not be influenced by the numbers from your live site. If you’re seeing high numbers of redirection hits on your staging site, it could be due to various reasons such as testing or development activities on the staging site itself.
When it comes to changing the target on a redirect, it is recommended to make the changes on both your staging and live sites. This ensures that the redirections are correctly set up on both environments and any changes made on the staging site will be reflected on the live site when you clone it.
Unfortunately, there isn’t specific documentation available on working with redirects on a staging site in the Rank Math knowledge base. However, you can still manage and configure redirects on your staging site using the Rank Math plugin just like you would on your live site.
Regarding clearing your logs, clearing both the logs (live and staging) simultaneously should not cause any issues. It can actually help you track new hits more accurately. However, please note that clearing the logs will remove all the existing data, so make sure to backup any important information before doing so.
If you have any further questions or need assistance with Rank Math, please feel free to reply to this ticket. Our dedicated support team is available 24/7 to help you.
Sources:
How to Use Rank Math on a Staging Site » Rank Math
How to Set Up Redirections » Rank Math
What Are HTTP Redirections? » Rank Math
Thank you for the helpful answer. I thought I saw someplace where I could clear the hits in the logs, but I can’t find how to do that. How do I clear out the hits from the redirect logs?
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention.
This will require you to head over to the database admin of your choice and clear all the entries from the hit column. Please refer to this screenshot:
The database table that you are going to look at is {Your_table_prefix}_rank_math_redirections.
We recommend conducting a full backup of your database first before doing the steps above.
Hope that helps.
Thank you.
We use a staging site, and the redirection hits on our staging site copy over the live site numbers when we clone staging to the live environment. How can I track hits on my live site when they are regularly replaced with staging site numbers? Do I need to do something to accurately track the numbers on the live site?
Any advice as to how to use RankMath while using a staging site would be very helpful.
I found this comment in a support ticket in the forum. So, the analytics and SEO analysis don’t work when using a staging environment? Should I disable those modules?
The only features that don’t work are the SEO Analysis and the Analytics for the reasons mentioned above.
All the other features such as Schema markup implementation, Content Analysis, Content AI, and all the features mentioned on our page here, will work: https://rankmath.com/wordpress/plugin/seo-suite/
As we mentioned before, a lot of our users test the plugin on staging environments like yours but you need to understand that some features are only relevant for live websites so it’s perfectly normal that they don’t work on staging environments and it’s not required, like the ones we mentioned initially.
Hello,
As long as your staging site is accessible publicly, all the Rank Math features should still work, although we don’t recommend setting up the Analytics and SEO analyzer in your staging site as it won’t give you reliable results. When setting up Analytics, you must make sure the URL matches the one you have set up on Google.
Back to the issue with your redirection, to ensure you won’t disturb the number of hits in your live website when pushing data from your staging site, you may need to make some exceptions in the database manually. Unfortunately, we don’t have this setting in our plugin as this will depend on the type of migrating tool you are using.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need my assistance with anything else.
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
