Set up projects for development and production environments

  • Updated
  • Optimizely Web Experimentation

Many organizations have separate development and production environments so they can build and test new features without disturbing production traffic. In Optimizely Web Experimentation, you can create separate projects for each environment to help with governance.

With separate development and production projects, your organization can safely build and QA experiments and Personalization campaigns in a development environment before deploying to production. This approach allows multiple stakeholders in your organization to act as gatekeepers for running new experiments in production.

To create separate environments in Optimizely Feature Experimentation, refer to the developer documentation on Managing Environments.

Set up projects

First, you should create two new projects: one for development and one for production. Each project needs its own snippet:

  1. Create a project for your development environment.

  2. Implement the snippet in the head tag for that environment.

  3. Add the collaborators who you'd like to have access to your development project.

  4. Create a project for your production environment.

  5. Implement the production project snippet in the head tag of the production environment.

  6. Add collaborators who should have access to your production project.

If you are using Optimizely Web Experimentation, prepare each project by creating all pages, events, and audiences in each project. If you have an Optimizely Web Experimentation Scale package, you can create events that are available across projects, which saves you time and makes it easier to keep events synchronized across your environments.

Create and deploy experiments

Once you have set up your development and production projects, use them to create, test, and deploy experiments.

  1. Create an experiment in your development environment. If your development URLs are the same as the URLs used for your production environment, make sure that your production environment does not use the snippet from your development project.

  2. Build and QA your new development experiment to make sure that everything works the way you like. 

  3. Build the experiment for your production project.

When you are ready, start the experiment in your production project.