: I want to test major changes on my website without hurting SEO I want to replace all my website files for new ones on the server and to test if they work alright but I don't want to be

@Caterina187

This is a bit radical but I came up with a solution for my whole IT office a number of years ago. We were looking for a better Operating System than windows. We went through some phases, but ended up using Linux Mint with the Mate Desktop. The learning curve was very low. Because it is based on Ubuntu you can load a Real LAMP Server, complete with domain names, and fully working .htaccess (which we use on every project). With Geany as a near match replacement for Notepad Plus Plus our IT Developer team appreciates each having a fully working apache2 server in their computer.

Of course this won't work if your shop is stuck with Windows, but for some people it is a perfect solution with low or no cost.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Murphy175

Don't do testing in a production environment if at all possible. It's a recipe for disaster.
Create a testing subdomain that's isolated from your production site as much as possible. This will allow you to test you changes on the server without, hopefully, endangering your production site. You can use robots.txt to block 'bots from this subdomain so it won't be indexed.
Ideally, you want to have your own development system, a development server, a testing server, a staging server and then production. You can cut out two of the in-between servers if you must but going directly from a desktop web environment to production has resulted in some of the worst messes I've been involved in.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Kevin317

Options:


Set up a local site for testing purposes. Something like WAMP should do the trick.
If you're going to do the testing on your live server, temporarily block your site while doing your testing. A 307 HTTP response would be appropriate.
Use basic authentication to keep crawlers and everybody else out while you do your testing. Since your site will be "down" for only 15 minutes there will be no side effects from this.

Vote Up Vote Down