How do you keep a record of what you changed on a live site?
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On client sites I often hear the same sentence a few weeks later: it worked before, what changed? Without a record, nobody can answer, not even me.
I have seen a short changelog file, a note in the project tool, and a dated list sent to the client after each visit. All of them work only if someone keeps them up to date, which is the hard part.
What do you use for your own site or your clients' sites, and what made you stick with it? Has a missing record ever cost you hours?
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I usually keep a short changelog with the date and the main changes so its easier to track issues later do you use git commits for this or maintain a separate log
The record only survives if writing it is part of making the change, not a step after it. Anything that relies on remembering to update a file afterwards gets skipped on the busy day, which is exactly the day you'll need it.
What works for me: nothing reaches the live site except through one path (a git push, a deploy script), so the history writes itself. Git answers "what changed and when" for free, as long as nobody edits the server directly.
When edits happen by hand in a CMS, keep the same shape in an append-only list: when, where, the old value, the new value, and how to undo it. The old value is the part people skip, and it's the one that actually answers "it worked before". "Updated the homepage title" doesn't tell you what it was, so you can't put it back. A useful habit is to write the undo line before making the change: if you can't write it, you're not ready to touch the live site.
A cheap safety net that needs no discipline at all: a daily snapshot of the key pages (status code, title, meta, a screenshot). When the client says it worked before, you compare yesterday with today and the answer is usually there.