Create and manage draft sites

Intro to draft sites 

Draft sites allow you to build and test new versions of your site, without affecting your live site. They are great for:

• Trying out a new website theme
• Updating your existing website theme
• Rebranding or redesigning your website
• Adding new functionalities to your website

Learn more about the difference between live and draft sites.

Create and edit a draft site

There are two ways to create a draft site:

Duplicate an existing site version

This is ideal if you’re looking to make and test small changes to your existing live site or a draft site.

1. In your dashboard, go to Site and select the site version you’d like to duplicate.
2. Click the three-dot icon in the top-right corner and select Duplicate as draft site.
3. Give the new draft site a unique version name.
4. Depending on the size of the original site version, it may take a few minutes for the site to be duplicated. Refresh the page to check if the draft site is ready.
5. Once it's ready, you can access and edit the draft site under Site > All Site Versions > Draft Sites. 

Create a draft site from scratch

This is ideal if you’re looking to create or test a new website theme.

1. In your dashboard, go to Site and select your live site.
2. Click the three-dot icon in the top-right corner and select Create draft site.
3. Give the new draft site a unique version name.
4. Choose a customisable theme.
5. Add a new page to start building your new site version.

Preview a draft site 

Draft sites are only visible to team members that are logged into the Easol account. To preview a draft site:

1. Go to Site and select your draft site.
2. Click the link under Domain.

To preview a specific experience page, blog post or biography, replace the live site domain with the draft site domain in your browser. Learn more about different page types.

Note: To test different content on an experience page without affecting the live version, you’ll need to create a new experience. This also applies to blog posts and biographies.

Publish a draft site to live

To publish a draft site:

1. In your dashboard, go to Site > All Site Versions.
2. Locate your draft site and click the three-dot icon.
3. Select Publish and Confirm.

The draft site is now live and can be accessed at your custom domain. Your old live site will be automatically switched to a draft site version.

After publishing a draft site, we highly recommend reviewing your website:

1. Check the metadata of your site pages
2. If any of your experiences are using a custom booking journey, make sure to update links to the new published site.

Delete a draft site

To delete a draft site:

1. In your dashboard, go to Site > All Site Versions.
2. Locate your draft site and click the three-dot icon.
3. Select Delete and Confirm.

It’s not possible to delete a live site. To delete a live site, you must first publish another site version.

Warning: Deleting a draft site cannot be undone.