W3 Total Cache – how to test on existing blog

Can someone recommend best practices for making changes in W3 Total Cache and then testing the results while minimizing the effects on site visitors?

I’m fairly new to this plug-in and I’ve been having some problems with blog post updates and comments not showing up immediately.

I have read many of the forum postings on this same topic and I believe it was a problem related to my recent W3 Total Cache update when all my settings got blown away. I did the best I could to reset everything, however now some browsers display the new content and other don’t even after flushing the browser cache multiple times. Eventually the content will show up in all browsers. This led me to believe it was a server-side issue with W3 Total Cache.

I have quite a bit of traffic on my blog so I don’t want to be making a bunch of test changes to my existing, published blog posts and triggering needless RSS updates.

So the workflow I’d like to do is:
– Make a change to a test page that doesn’t show up in RSS
– Make change to W3 Total Cache settings
– Empty the W3 cache
– Retest the page using browser and performance tools
– Repeat until desired performance metrics are reached