Drafted pages

Updated

Save pages as draft to prevent them from being published.

You can save pages as draft to save unfinished pages or works in progress, internal-only pages (e.g., style guides, internal documentation, etc.), archived content, or backup versions. Draft pages aren’t published when you publish your site and aren’t included in site search.

Pro tip

To share published pages with clients or a specific audience without making them generally available on your site, you can password protect published pages or folders of pages.

How to save a page as a draft

To save any static page as a draft, go to its Page settings, click the “dropdown arrow” icon next to the Save menu, and choose Save as draft.

Important

When you publish your site after saving a previously published page as draft, the page is unpublished from your live site and removed from your site’s auto-generated sitemap. You can use 301 redirects to redirect drafted pages to live pages.

Note

You can’t save a homepage as draft and you can’t set a draft page as the homepage. You also can’t save the 404 page or the password page as draft.

How to publish a draft page

If you want to publish a page that’s set to draft, go to its Page settings, click the “dropdown arrow” icon next to the Save menu, and choose Stage for publish. Pages you stage for publish go live the next time you publish your entire site.

Best practices for creating a draft page backup

If you want to create a new version of a page on your site — for example, a redesigned Contact page — you’ll either create a new page and start from scratch, or duplicate the existing page, save it as a draft, and edit the duplicate until it’s ready to be published and replace the old page.

When the new page is ready, we recommend following these steps to publish the new page:

  1. Rename the old page (e.g., change Contact to Contact - V1)
  2. Edit the old page’s slug (e.g., change contact to contact-v1)
  3. Save the old page as draft
  4. Rename the new page (e.g., change Contact - WIP to Contact)
  5. Edit the new page’s slug to match the old page’s previous slug (e.g., change contact-wip to contact) — this preserves your links and SEO
  6. Stage the page to publish
  7. Publish your site

Note

You can’t create new pages using the slugs of drafted pages. If you intend to use the same slug as a drafted page for a new page, you’ll need to edit the slug of the drafted page first.

Note

Drafted pages are included when you export your site.

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