How many WordPress staging/production sites are indexed by Google?

There is no definitive answer to how many WordPress staging sites are indexed by Google, as it may vary depending on how the sites are set up and how Google crawls them. However, one way to estimate this number is to use the site: operator in Google search and look for common subdomains or folders that indicate a staging site.  

For example, you can search for site:.wpengine.com, site:.staging-site.link, site:.dev.cc, site:/staging, site:*/dev, and so on. You can also use other search operators, such as inurl: or intitle:, to refine your results. 

Using just one of these search operators we identified over 185,000 (at the time of writing) indexed pages from staging environments in the Google index. 

According to an article from Search Engine Journal, Google has indexed over 2,000 staging sites from WP Engine, a popular WordPress hosting service. The article also explains how to prevent staging sites from being indexed using robots.txt, noindex tags, or access restrictions. 

According to this blog post on Search Engine Land, Google has indexed over 2,050,000 WP Engine sites that use a staging subdomain. The post also provides some tips on how to fix this issue and avoid potential SEO problems. 

These are just some examples, and the actual number of WordPress staging sites indexed by Google may be much higher or lower, depending on how many sites use WordPress, how many of them have staging sites, and how many of them are properly blocked or hidden from search engines. Therefore, it is important to check your own site and make sure your staging site is not indexed by Google or other search engines, as it may affect your SEO performance and expose sensitive information.  

Preventing your staging site URL’s getting indexed is actually very simple, but it requires an action often missed by a site admin or developer. 

With Indexping.com you can monitor your staging/production site URLs and get alerts if Google indexes one of your sites. It’s simple, inexpensive but the potential cost savings are immeasurable compared to a staging site being indexed and going unnoticed for weeks/months/years.