How to Share a Wix Website Without Publishing It
Updated: 5 days ago
To share a Wix website without publishing it, use Get Client Feedback:
Go to your site's dashboard.
Click Site Actions at the top right.
Select Get Client Feedback.
Enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite and click Send, or click Copy Link and send the link yourself.
They can view your latest saved version and leave comments, without a Wix account.
Below are the three ways to let somebody see or work on 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.
What the feedback 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. It shows the most recently saved version of your site, so save before you send it. 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.
When they comment, you get an email and an alert in your editor, and you can reply to and resolve each comment from there.
Can I just share the preview link?
Not reliably. Preview in the Wix editor is for you, the person editing. Some tutorials suggest copying the preview address from your browser, but Wix's own help article on sharing a site before publishing describes the feedback link, not the preview, and we have not confirmed a copied preview address opens for someone else. Use the feedback link.
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.
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Your site's rankings, map results, site health and links. Costs nothing, for as long as you keep it. Lite does not include the work on your site. Starter does.
How to share a Wix website with someone to edit it
To let someone edit your Wix site, invite them as a collaborator: go to Roles and Permissions in your site's dashboard, click Invite Collaborators, enter their email address, choose a role, and send. Feedback and editing access are two different requests, and they get confused because both start with the word share.
Choosing a role
The predefined roles include Admin, described as Co-Owner, Website Manager, and Website Designer, and you can create a custom role if none is the right size. Give a designer the Website Designer role if they will only work on how the site looks. 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.
Which way of sharing do you need?
What you want | What to use | Where |
Someone to look and comment before launch | Get Client Feedback link | Dashboard, Site Actions |
Someone to change the site | Collaborator invitation with a role | Dashboard, Roles and Permissions |
The live site taken offline | Unpublish | Editor, Site menu |
The site live but kept out of search for now | Stop search engines indexing it | Publishing and SEO settings |
Capron Media (ours) | Free Lite subscription: once your site is live, see how it is doing. See where your site shows up in Google search. Lite does not include the work on your site. Starter does. | After you publish |
Can two people work on the site at the same time?
Wix's 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, and we will not guess. What it does say is that you get one free collaborator seat by default, which for many 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.
Can you publish on Wix without paying?
Yes. Wix lets you publish a site for free on a Wix web address, in the form username.wixsite.com/sitename. Connecting your own domain, such as yourbusiness.com, needs a paid Premium plan. So if the goal is only to show someone a finished draft, publishing on the free address is another option, though anyone with the address can see it.
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: one that asks search engines not to index 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 common problem.
Is it possible to export a Wix website?
Not as a working site you can move elsewhere. Your Wix site lives inside Wix's product, so moving to another platform means rebuilding the pages there and redirecting the old addresses, not exporting a file. That is worth knowing before you build, and it is the main trade-off of any hosted website builder.
Before you do publish
The reason to care about any of this is that the first title and description a search engine reads are what it shows people until it reads the page again. 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 Capron Media charges to run that routine is on our pricing page.
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.
From Capron Media: the free Lite subscription
While you build, check any live site
Your own site doesn't use up a check. You can check up to three other sites, each once every 30 days. Lite does not include the work on your site. Starter does.
Written by Spencer Capron, founder of Capron Media, a Middleborough, Massachusetts SEO service for small business owners. Spencer is HubSpot SEO II certified, holds CompTIA Security+, and has run recurring SEO programs for 30+ small-business clients. He wrote this post in collaboration with our AI agents, and he reviews everything published here.
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