How to Share a Wix Website Without Publishing It

There is a feature built for exactly this, and we did not mention it on this page until we checked. Below are the three ways to let somebody see a Wix site before it goes live, what each one actually does, and which one you want. The steps are taken from Wix's own help pages rather than from memory.

The way Wix intends you to do it

If what you want is for somebody to look at the site and tell you what they think, this is the answer and it takes about a minute.

Get Client Feedback

From your site dashboard, open the Site Actions menu at the top right and choose Get Client Feedback. You can enter email addresses and send invitations, or copy the shareable link and send it however you like. The people you send it to can view the site and leave comments on specific areas of it.

What the link does, and what it does not do

The shareable link is valid for two weeks, so it is a review window rather than a permanent address. Comments cannot be added from a mobile browser, which matters if the person reviewing is going to open it on a phone. And the people commenting do not need a Wix account of their own, which is the part that makes it usable with a client who has no interest in learning your website builder.

So can I just share the preview link?

Not usefully, and this is where the common advice goes wrong. Preview in the editor is for you, the person editing. The thing you can hand to somebody else is the feedback link above. If you have read elsewhere that the only options are screenshots or a screen share, that advice predates the feature or was never checked against it. We had it on this page ourselves until we checked.

Giving somebody access to work on it

Feedback and access are two different requests, and they get confused because both start with the word share. If the person needs to change something rather than comment on it, they need a role on the site.

Inviting a collaborator

Go to Roles and Permissions in your site dashboard and click Invite Collaborators. Enter their email address, tick the role you want them to have, and send. The predefined roles are Admin, described as Co-Owner, Website Manager, and Website Designer, and you can create a custom role if none of the three is the right size. Invitations expire after thirty days, so if somebody says they never got in, check the date before you check the spam folder.

The part that is easy to miss

A Wix site comes with one free collaborator seat by default, and a seat is only filled once somebody accepts. That is fine for one designer or one person helping out. If you are planning to bring in a small team, the seat count is the thing to check first, because it is the constraint that decides the answer rather than anything about permissions.

Can two people work on the site at the same time?

Google lists this among the questions people also ask, and none of the five results it returns for the main query addresses it. We are not going to fill that gap with a guess. Wix's own documentation on inviting collaborators does not cover simultaneous editing, so we cannot tell you what happens when two people are in the editor at once. What the documentation does say is that you get one free collaborator seat by default, which for most small sites settles the question before it is asked. If you are running a team where it does not, treat it as something to test on a copy of the site rather than something to assume.

The site is already live and you want it taken down

A different problem from the one above, and it has a direct answer.

Unpublishing

In the editor, open the Site menu in the top toolbar and choose Unpublish Site, then confirm. Wix is explicit about the effect: once unpublished, your site will not be accessible to anyone, even if they have the direct URL. It is reversible, you keep the editor, and you can publish again whenever you want. Unpublishing does not cancel your domain or your Premium plan, which is worth knowing before you assume it stops the billing.

The cost of leaving it down

Wix's own guidance says that if your site is unpublished for more than a few days, your search ranking may be affected. That is the real trade in unpublishing, and it is the reason it is the wrong tool for a review. Taking a live site down so one person can look at a draft costs you standing you have already earned, when a two-week feedback link would have done the same job.

Keeping a live site out of search results

There is a third case that gets filed under the same question. If the site needs to be reachable but you do not want it turning up in search yet, that is a separate setting rather than an unpublish. Wix's publishing guidance notes the option to prevent search engines from indexing the site. It is the right control for a soft launch, and it is also the one people forget to switch off afterwards, which is a far more common problem than any of the above.

Before you do publish

The reason to care about any of this is that the first version of a page a search engine sees is the one it forms an impression from, and impressions are cached and shown to people. So the sequence matters: get the feedback, make the changes, then publish once with the titles and descriptions already written rather than added later. What is worth having in place before that moment is set out in our guide to Wix SEO, which separates the part the platform handles for you from the part that is yours.

Once the site is live the job stops being a launch and becomes a routine, and what we charge to run that routine is on our pricing page. It is one number and it does not change with the size of your site.

And if the site is ready and you would rather somebody told you what a search engine makes of it before you launch, book a free SEO consultation. You will speak to the person who does the work.

Written by Spencer Capron at Capron Media, in collaboration with our AI agents. The same way we do the work for clients. Spencer reviews everything published here.