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Updated 11 months ago

Unpublish specific pages

At a glance

The post is about a community member who published a Landing Page and would like to unpublish it without deleting it, so they can publish it later or make small changes. The comments discuss various approaches to this issue:

Some community members suggest keeping the page unpublished and unlinked, or disabling search engine indexing, as a simple solution. However, others argue that this can cause problems with broken links. The community members acknowledge the need for a more robust mechanism to handle unpublished or draft pages, especially for larger projects with many drafts.

Suggestions include using a "draft" folder or prefix to organize unpublished pages, as well as adding a "draft" page status to indicate that a page should not be bundled in the published site. The community members also discuss the potential challenges of relying on these conventions, such as the risk of forgetting to update the robots file or correctly organizing the pages.

While there is no explicitly marked answer, the community members agree that an "unpublish" feature would be a valuable addition, and one of them has created an issue to track the progress of this feature request.

Useful resources
I published a Landing Page that I would like to Unpublish. I don't want to delete the page since I would like to publish it later (Or duplicate it to make small changes). Is it possible to add this Feature ? Thank you.
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26 comments
If the page you don't want to see published is not linked - then user won't see it already.
Additionally in page settings you can disable search engines from indexing it.
not publishing specific pages is not on our roadmap because its going to cause problems when linked
@Oleg Isonen Thank you for your reply
Edited, somehow mistyped is not
Hmm, you are of course correct that simply unpublishing can cause 404s. Then again, any CMS still lets you unpublish content.

The OP's point is very valid from a workflow perspective - in our E-Commerce we have hundreds of product drafts at any given time, that have to remain unpublished until the products have arrived.

I get that WS is no CMS, yet the same desire can apply for portfolio sites. Also here you may want to work on pages that you cannot show yet or have no time to finish in the current editing session.

Yes, keeping published pages unlinked and unindexed (and hopefully out of the sitemap!) makes it relatively hard (but not impossible) to find the WiP pages - yet I would appreciate a more robust mechanism to skip pages.

If that is difficult to accomplish, there should be a simple way to export draft pages out and to bring them back in.
That's fine - just don't link them πŸ™‚
So users don't see them
on a CMS you have a more robust mechanism
on static pages - this mechanism should be alright, because you don't have hundreds of them
What happens if you create a page, hide it through a special button and then you have a link pointing to it? The link would be point to a broken page
One thing that could be practical here is that when you are working on a draft you want other peers to know to NOT link to that draft page, so it doesn't appear in the link pages list
and its visible in the navigator that nobody should use it yet
kinda work in progress communication to the peers.
that is something that makes sense
though this is not the original "unpublish a spcific page" feature request, this is "mark as draft" feature request
At the moment this can be done VERY simply by putting a draft page in a "draft" folder or prefix the page name with "DRAFT"
I appreciate all the input, for now, I won't be actively working on this.
Thanks for your elaborate reply! See - I wasn't even aware that moving to a Draft folder or even only prefixing would solve that problem... πŸ˜€

But both folders and prefixes still seem to be undocumented.
Its not a special folder
nothing to document
just an idea how to organize work in a team
I'd also like the ability to unpublish. I've read your reasoning but reasoning isn't possible with some clients. As you're the host I'd imagine it would be a case of updating a config, .htaccess maybe with the request. Robots find pages. Even if there's an option to amend the robots file and shift the document to another, unknown to client folder, I may forget to add it to robot file or incorrectly etc etc. It could land me in real trouble. If the only way I can be sure something isn't seen is to delete it that seems counter intuitive.
We agreed that unpublish function has a solid ground to exist and I created an issue, follow it for updates https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio/issues/2891
Another idea here would be to add page statuses like Webflow does. A draft page status would tell Webstudio not to bundle that page in the published site.
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