This conversation is feeding my suspicion that a lot of the problems people have with Wordpress come from not knowing how to work with Wordpress.

The professional approach is a local copy for development, a staging copy on hosting for QA, and then production. Code goes up in deployments; DB and files come down in regular synchronization. If there are multiple devs you might also have an integration copy on hosting.

This is not specific to WP; I’ve seen the same workflow work for other DB-backed CMSs like Drupal.

I've worked in environments using the exact approach you described, and it definitely seems like the prevalent workflow using these CMSs.

Still doesn't help that most WP sites I've ever seen inevitably were those huge card castles just waiting to crumble at the next plugin update. Cause of course, the remarketing plugin the client needs/wants installed just introduced some weird edge-case bug when used in combination with the latest version of the forms plugin you use. Or they ask (demand) administrative privileges "cause they're paying" and proceed to start messing with the configuration themselves and destroy everything. All the local development copies in the world won't make it less temperamental and brittle.

Its success - IMHO - doesn't have much to do with its technological merits but familiarity. Most "content" people know how to use WP, so companies like to have WP for their content management.

Or maybe I'm just bitter of my time working in the kind of environments that tend to focus on WP. Although last news I got were they were starting to use it more as headless CMSes.

We do it with a secondary copy of our website.

Honestly though, there's a lot of talk about changes here without much talk of the most obvious class of changes that Wordpress is designed to support: adding content to your website or blog.

For all its faults it does make that very easy, and it's designed with the intent that you will do so by working directly on the live site (you can obviously preview and review content before making it live).

Changing layout and templates is trickier, likewise creating a new page layout, and that's where a staging or development site comes in handy.

Indeed, I have 3 copies of my wordpress site.

The main one, where people update content.

Then there's a backup that gets auto restored every morning (with appropiate sed etc to change URLS), which is suitable for developing and testing any code changes

The third is one which is manually restored from the backup, and suitable for longer term experiments, how best to organise pages, etc.

Have a dev site, which is easy with modern tools.

Even can do a CI/CD system.