Creating a Replacement Page for an Active Website

I am hoping someone can suggest the best step-by-step workflow to get me where I need to be.

We have a Squarespace website which is working wonderfully! We want to add a good number of anchors on an existing page. I anticipate the changes and testing will take a few days so I hope to create the altered page offline (unpublished) and then "drop" it in to replace the old version of the page.

1. create an inactive (unpublished)  duplicate of the page to be altered (e.g. create "TEST_Places_of_Interest" from "Places_of_Interest")
   Note: the test page will not need to interact with the active website during alterations
2. when the new page is finished I want to smoothly replace the live page with the new version. "Smoothly", as in maintaining all of the links to the page from other website pages.
   - - Should I delete "Places_of_Interest" and then re-name "TEST_Places_of_Interest" as "Places_of_Interest"?
   - - When in the process should I activate/publish the 'new' page?

I will greatly appreciate any and all suggestions and discussion. 

Thank you! JIm in Maine

When you're ready, publish the new page. 

Then (quickly) do the following:

• Rename the url slug of the old page - I usually suffix -old onto the end (eg. index-old)
• Rename the url slug of the new page to the one the old page had (eg. index in the case above)
• If the old page is in the main navigation, drag it down into not linked and drag the new page up into its place
• If the old page was the homepage set the new page to be the homepage
• Test it's all working
• Delete the index-old page. 

Okay Colin! -- thank you! I would never have known to mess around with the url slugs ...the purpose of the "slug" has always been a mystery.

I have already logged into our account and gone into "Pages". I right-clicked on the page to be re-imagined and was overjoyed to see the option to "Duplicate".  The new "Copy of ..." page immediately appeared in the list of "Not Linked" pages.

Again, thank you, Colin. 

Jim

That's great Jim - glad to be of help.