topic Re: Clone website for testing in CMS Development

Clone website for testing

SarahOps — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 14:50:00 GMT

Hi,

My company's website is managed through HubSpot. Is it possible to clone my website and use the clone version as a testing environment before I publish my content on the real website? The preview feature of HubSpot CMS is too limited. I often only discover mistakes once my page is published so looking for a work-around as close to a staging environment as possible. Any recommendations welcome. Thanks, Eugenie

Re: Clone website for testing

albertsg — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 17:58:39 GMT

Hi @SarahOps, you can definetely clone a Website for testing purposes, just click the Clone button.

If you want to publish it just for testing, then I recommend adding "noindex, nofollow" meta tags. Here's an article about it: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-unindex-pages-from-search-engines

BUT here's the catch, this will only allow you to test content on the page.

If what you want is to update the code, you should clone your template also and assign it to the new cloned page. The reason why is that if you update the template, it will affect all pages under this template.

Re: Clone website for testing

SarahOps — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 08:36:52 GMT

Hi @albertsg ,

Thanks for the tip. If my understanding is correct, this is on a page-by-page basis correct? Do you know if there is a way I could clone the whole website in 1 click? Also, as a follow-up question, if a page is "noindex" and "nofollow", and it contains a form, would I still be able to test the form? Thanks

Re: Clone website for testing

albertsg — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 08:59:32 GMT

Hi again @SarahOps, I believe there is no "one button" way to clone the whole site, you would need to do it page by page.

Maybe it's worth to set up a Sandbox account to test everything before release it to production. Here you have more info about it: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/account/set-up-a-hubspot-sandbox-account

Regarding the follow-up question, noindex - nofollow just avoids this page to be indexed, but it won't prevent any functionality to work. So if you have a form in the page, it will work as it works in the "main" page.

Re: Clone website for testing

SarahOps — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 09:47:23 GMT

Hi @albertsg, understood, thank you!

Re. Sandbox account, I have a sandbox account set up already. Do you know if it is possible to connect the same website domain to a production and sandbox account?

Thanks,

Eugenie

Re: Clone website for testing

albertsg — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 09:54:08 GMT

I don't think it's possible to connect the same domain to both accounts. But Hubspot Support could give you more information about this, maybe they have a different approach to your question 🙂

Re: Clone website for testing

SarahOps — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 11:31:59 GMT

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