copy over old site

Hi – I’m new to WP & have been testing it a bit & would like to set up a static site. I would like to use it to replace an existing site – not a WP site – but would like to leave up the exiting site & complete all the changes & content on the new before going live.

So does WP allow for me to save the new in a folder eg. ‘wp’ & then in the cpanel file manager delete ‘public_html’, rename ‘wp’ as ‘public_html’ & all is fine, with the links being in place?
I suppose the database is the main thing.

Has anyone done this? Thanks.