Why not add the pages directly to the production site, setting them to future publish on 7/1? They will not be available to search engines until then. Attempting to request such pages ahead of time merely results in the 404 page unless WP matches the request to a closely named page that is currently available. There would not even be any reason for a search bot to make such a request as there would not be any links to these pages to start with.
What if I am changing an existing page but I don’t want that to publish until 7/1? Can I do that too? (I am kind of new to the intricacies of WP)
So the current page needs to remain as is and available, then these edits should automatically be applied at a certain date? That would take some additional setup beyond simply scheduling a future publish date.
If there is something in common with these various pages in how they need to change, it’s probably possible to setup a template to show one thing up to some date, then show another after that. The template could toggle back and forth between two setups. You can alter the content of the hidden content as needed, then it will be swapped back out after a specified date.
A plugin like Advanced Custom Fields can be used to define the fields. A custom template then gets the field content and displays it where needed within each page. Depending on the values of a couple date fields, one set of fields is displayed if not the other.
Going back to your original idea if custom fields are not viable, you can alter the next index field values within phpMyAdmin, in effect reserving a block of IDs into which you can import data without conflict. Let’s say the next ID in the production DB will be 1234. You want to insert 100 posts from staging. Set the next ID in production to be 1325. Set the next ID in staging to be 1234. Add your pages to staging. When you export the same to production, they will slide into that empty range of 1234-1324. You’ll also need to run a query that changes the status of the production posts you are replacing to inherit so they become backup copies that do not conflict with the imported posts.
