What are best practices make significant changes to production sites?

[Ross_Comer]

Question:
How do I make significant changes to a website in production (my own or a clients) without risking breaking the existing site?

Product:
Wix Studio

What are you trying to achieve:
I’m building out a site for a client including CMS, Online Programs, code, etc. Once we put it into production, what’s the best way to significantly modify that site (add new pages, change existing pages, change CMS, etc) without risking breaking their current live website? For example, I might change existing pages, add new pages, change the CMS structure, etc.

Also, while the client can give me permissions to edit their sites, I’d like to understand if I could do this on my own account and then transfer the site to the client, overwriting their current site.

I’m envisioning duplicating their existing site, modifying the duplicate, and then copying it back to their production site, leaving things like CMS data in place in the production site (might involve copying their CMS data over at the last minute and updating it to the new structure, etc) .

Additional information:
Found a similar post on Wix Editor which went unanswered:

Best practice for WIX/EditorX release management - does one exist?

Is there some practical guide how to do practical release management in WIX, including development and testing? The question is: how to make sure that all additions and changes are done “in the background” during development and testing. Why do I ask? The problem in WIX (so it seems to me) is that I cannot work on a full parallel website (the development site) with a WIX domain, and then simply switch the production domain to the fully tested development site. Neither can I copy complete pag…

Copy pages might be an option but doesn’t seem to be available in Studio?

Import other Wix pages to other sites

Hey Wally, If you’re using Wix Editor, good news. You can actually copy entire pages across from one Wix site to another - Wix Editor: Copying and Pasting Elements and Pages to Another Site | Help Center | Wix.com. Trust, this was a common pain point a few years ago, and the Wix team delivered. You shouldn’t need code for this one. If this is what you meant, don’t forget to mark as solved, but if it isn’t please comment back

[onemoretime]

Hi, @Ross_Comer !!

Have you already tried the test site feature?

Publishing a Test Site | Help Center | Wix.com

[Ross_Comer]

That is exactly what I am looking for. Thanks!

After reading a bit, it seems like the live CMS is shared unless I set up a sandbox CMS. I’m assuming I can change the structure of the Test Site (add columns) without impacting the live site. Then when I’m ready to publish, I go to the live site, modify the structure to match the test site, copy the items from the Live Site to the test site, and then send it back to the live site when I make the test site the real site (100%).