Can we make changes manually on production end user pages?

Environment:

Customer Portal, All versions

Resolution:

We do not recommend making changes manually to end-user pages in production, you should always be following the deployment process explained at Answer ID 2849: Deploying Customer Portal pages.

There are number of optimizations done during the normal deployment process such as:

• Condensing all of the Javascripts into a header file for each page
• Making one big CSS file out of all the individual CSS files

So it is not just copying source code files between "Development to Staging to Production", doing these modifications manually can break end-user pages in production.