The best staging systems are built and managed with the help of a professional. This involves finding the right virtual staging provider to align with, formalizing a reseller partnership fully, marketing services strategically to real estate clients, and consistently monitoring commissioned rates, sales outcomes, and staging quality over time.

Staging environments should be as close to production as possible to provide safe conditions for QA testing and feedback from non-technical stakeholders. Ideally, this means using the same back-end and up-and-downstream services as production and replicating the same data at scale.

Empowering Education: Portable Staging for Schools

In the era of rapid software releases, new features, and bug fixes are almost always necessary to maintain user retention, but these updates must be tested in a controlled environment that can replicate high volumes of traffic or the performance that users will experience under load. Failure to perform these tests could result in a broken product that leads to lost sales, customer attrition, or violations of your SLAs.

While some may argue that staging isn’t necessary when deploying to production via canary or blue/green deployments, this method of releasing changes to live products exposes users to bugs and misconfigurations that would not be detected on developer laptops or in a dev environment that doesn’t mimic the infrastructure and performance of production.

Creating and maintaining a good staging system takes discipline, but the cost savings you realize by reducing production outages and lost customer satisfaction make it worth the effort. Keep track of outages linked to staging issues and the amount of time spent troubleshooting or thwarted deploys to help convince your team of the value of a staging system.