Drafted pages

Saving a page as draft will ensure that this page won’t be published when you publish the project from the Designer or when you or a collaborator publishes the site from the Editor.

We built this to help out with a bunch of core workflows, including:

• Unfinished pages. Pretty simple: if you’re not done with something, don’t publish it yet.
• Internal pages. Got a style guide page? An internal documentation page? Save it as a draft and it’ll only be visible in the Designer and Editor.
• Archived content. Got an old page that you don’t want to publish, but don’t want to get rid of? Save it as a draft.
• Backups. Want to keep a version of a page but hide it from view? Save it as a draft.

Pro tip

You can password protect published pages or folders of pages if you need to share them with only clients, or a specific audience.

In this lesson, we talk about:

1. Saving a page as draft
2. Staging a drafted page for publish
3. Best practices - creating a page backup

Saving a page as draft

You can save any static page as draft from the save menu in the Page settings.

Good to know

You can also save the Search results page as a draft if you decide to remove search from your site.

Saving a page as draft in the Editor

You and any Collaborators can also save any static page as a draft in the Editor.

Need to know

If you save previously published pages as draft, they will be unpublished from your site the next time you publish your project. Any links to these pages will be broken. To redirect these pages, change the slug of that drafted page to something else like pagename-old. Then, redirect the old page by setting a 301 redirect. Learn how to set 301 redirects.

Staging drafted pages for publish

If you decide to publish a page that’s set as a draft, simply stage it for publish from the Page settings. Any page staged for publish will be published the next time you publish your entire project.

Best practices - creating a page backup

If you want to create a new version of a page. You’ll either create a new page and start from scratch or duplicate the existing page and edit it there. You can save this new page as a draft until it’s ready to be published and replace the old page.

Now, when the new page is ready, you’d want to do:

1. Rename the old page (optional) — ex. About-old, Contact-3, etc..
2. Rename the old page’s slug (recommended) — ex. about-old, contact-3, etc.
3. Save the old page as draft
4. Rename the new page (optional)
5. Rename the slug of the new page to preserve your links and SEO — ex. Rename about-wip to about.
6. Stage the page to publish
7. Publish your project

Pro tip

Slugs of drafted pages won’t be available when creating new pages. So, if you intend to use the same slug for a new page, make sure to rename the slug of the drafted page first.

Good to know

• You cannot save a homepage as draft and you cannot set a drafted page as a homepage
• You cannot save the 404 page nor the password page as draft
• Drafted pages will be removed from your site’s auto-generated sitemap
• Drafted pages will not be included in Webflow’s site search
• Drafted pages will be included when you export your project