Create a sandbox site to experiment with new customizations and features before applying changes to your live site!
Get Started with a Sandbox Site
Are you looking to experiment with a new theme, feature, or change a workflow on your Thinkific site but are worried about impacting your student experience?
It’s time to use a sandbox site!
Like a sandbox built for children, your sandbox site is a protected area that gives you an opportunity to play with new tools and features without the fear of a rogue wave wrecking your work.
With our Plus plan, you’ll get a dedicated sandbox site to support all of your testing needs.
What is a sandbox site?
A sandbox site is a software testing environment that enables you to build, monitor and test a Thinkific Plus site. Your sandbox site allows you to work on website design, identify workflow improvements, try different themes, and test integrations and content delivery methods, before launching the site live on your hosted domain.
Your sandbox site is both fully operational and separate from your primary Thinkific Plus site(s) which allows for an uninterrupted testing environment. It can do everything that your live site can, such as putting through purchases, creating users, and more. The testing environment means your team can try new integrations, test API responses, and experiment with new features, without impacting your user experience.
What are the benefits of a sandbox site?
Independent testing: Your sandbox site is an independent testing environment that doesn’t impact other running programs. It is great for experimenting with integrations and API.
Train and get creative: Your sandbox site gives your team the opportunity to get creative and make mistakes, without impacting your core audience. Because this isn’t a live site, you can use it to train your team, try new ideas, and run experiments.
Try new Thinkific Plus features: Thinkific Plus is constantly making improvements to our platform and adding features to better support our customers. A sandbox site enables you to try and learn our new features and themes before you commit to making changes live on your site.
Experience your site as an end-user: With your sandbox site, you’re able to do 360-degree testing on integrations, courses, and workflows to experience exactly what your end-user will see on your site.
SandBox Site Best Practices
Theme updates: When a theme update occurs, use your sandbox site to test out the changes before updating your live Thinkific Plus site.
Course Builder: Build out your courses and test their settings in your sandbox site before making changes to your live Thinkific Plus site. This ensures that your students will get a seamless learning experience when changes are made.
Test! Test! Test! Go over and test all the details of your Thinkific Plus site before they go live. These include custom domains, settings, and other site related actions such as modifying site text, designs, sign up tracking codes and site footer codes to understand what changes are propagated to your Thinkific Plus site.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I copy or push content from my sandbox site to my Thinkific Plus site?
Your sandbox site is for testing and is not connected to your Thinkific Plus site. This means that content cannot be pushed or go live from your sandbox site to your Thinkific Plus site. This is intended to maintain the integrity of the testing platform.
Themes, theme settings including styles and colors, typography, favicon, any content within Site Builder, integrations, and user/ student data cannot be copied over.
Courses however, can be copied from your sandbox to your Thinkific Plus site with the help of your Customer Success Manager. This means you can create new courses on your sandbox site and have them copied to your live site when they are ready to go! Note that this applies to course content including lessons and chapters only, course landing pages cannot be copied.
How do I get a sandbox site with Thinkific?
Sandbox sites are only available for our Thinkific Plus customers. Learn more about Thinkific Plus here.
If I'm a Thinkific Partner do I get a Sandbox site?
Yes! Learn more about Thinkific Partner benefits here.
How many sandbox sites do I get with Thinkific Plus?
Each Thinkific Plus customer is entitled to one dedicated sandbox site.
Do students registered on my sandbox site contribute to my active student count?
No, they are totally independent of your active student count as your sandbox site is for testing purposes only.