Today’s modern websites are not the simple collection of files they once were in the past. Today’s content management system (CMS)  based websites  can bring together the work of dozens of people and give a business person the publishing power that only web developers had ten years ago. In a rapid, frequent publishing environment, particularly when dynamic features are involved, doing testing on features before they go live is absolutely critical. Doing testing on a live site can be risky, damage  the site, or cause an unexpected user experience. This is why we use Development Instances, copies of the website installed on testing servers, when we’re in a maintenance role for an online investment such as a website or app. There are great benefits to doing this in terms of development speed and improving collaboration on updates.

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