If you work with Optimizely CMS SaaS across multiple clients, you know the anxiety — multiple tabs, multiple environments, and one wrong edit away from breaking a live site.
At Horizontal Digital, we manage several Optimizely CMS instances for different clients, each with production and test environments. The Optimizely UI looks identical across all of them. The only difference? A small label buried in the top nav: “hodi01saas: Production1” vs “hodi01saas: Test1”. Easy to miss when you’re moving fast.
So I built a Chrome extension to make it impossible to miss.
What It Does
The Optimizely CMS PROD Indicator extension does three things when it detects you’re on a Production1 environment:
- Adds a bold red border around the entire browser viewport
- Prefixes the browser tab title with
[PROD – Client Name] - Shows a small “PROD” label in the left panel area
It works across all clients automatically — it reads the org name (e.g., “ClientA”, “ClientB”) directly from the CMS nav and includes it in the indicator so you always know which client’s production you’re in.
On Test1, Test2, or any non-production environment? Nothing shows up. Clean UI, no distractions.
How It Works
Optimizely CMS SaaS uses Web Components with shadow DOM for its navigation, which means standard document.querySelector calls can’t reach the nav labels. The extension recursively pierces nested shadow roots to find the environment label, checks if it contains "Production1", and only then injects the indicators.
It also watches for the components to hydrate (they load asynchronously) using a MutationObserver, so it works reliably on page load. No data is collected, no network requests — everything runs locally in the browser.
Install It
The extension is available on the Chrome Web Store — search for Optimizely CMS PROD Indicator or click here to install.
For fellow Optimizely developers and agency folks managing multiple client environments, I hope this saves you the same stress it saves our team. Drop a comment below if you have feedback or feature requests!