I am using free version of HS, and we don’t have a staging server.
I needed to make extensive home page updates, so I:
1.) Cloned the Home page
2.) Made the edits and now want to make it the new “home” page for my domain URL.
How do i do this, without breaking anything? I am thinking of:
1.) renaming current home to www.mycompany.com/2
2.) publishing my new home page: www.mycompany.com
Will that work?
Personally speaking in the future, unless you hit publish on the page, you can preview pages without affecting the live site. I would have recommended going that route where possible.
But with your case you will need to do as you suggest. There will be a brief moment where your site directs to an error while you are making the change. Then once the change is complete you will then want to unpublish your old homepage so visitors don’t get to that page.