How to Preview Your Squarespace Website in Trial Mode
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When you’re logged into Squarespace and viewing your website from the Squarespace dashboard, the version of your website that you see is not necessarily the same version your visitors will see. Sometimes there are little quirks or visual differences between your site when viewed from your Squarespace dashboard and your live site.
For that reason, I like to have a separate browser tab open to my live website while I’m editing, and I just keep refreshing the live website tab whenever I save a change in Squarespace.
However, if your site is not live yet it’s not as easy as opening a new browser tab and navigating to your website. To preview your Squarespace website in trial mode, you’ll need to use the built-in domain followed by ?noredirect.
Using Your Site’s Built-In Domain
The built-in domain of your Squarespace website is the part of the URL that ends in “.squarespace.com”. So while you have your website open in the Squarespace dashboard, at the top of your browser in the address bar, you should see something like this:
Copy that and paste it into a new tab or new browser window, and add ?noredirect to the end of it. It should look like this:
Now, you can view your website as if it were live without any of the Squarespace dashboard or editing panels.
If you paste the built-in domain without adding the ?noredirect, or if you mistype ?noredirect, it will just redirect you back to the Squarespace dashboard (assuming you’re still logged in to your Squarespace account). So if you’re seeing that happen, double check that you don’t have a typo.
I also want to mention that there is a way to preview your website in full screen mode from within the Squarespace dashboard. When you’re not in Edit mode, you should see a little arrow icon in the upper right corner pointing diagonally upwards.
Clicking on this will keep you in the Squarespace back-end, but will hide all the editing panels. However, I have sometimes found little quirks with how the website looks or behaves in this preview mode that I do not see in the live website. It doesn’t happen very often, so if you just want a quick peek at your website full screen, feel free to use this method. If you ever see something that is not behaving as you’d expect, that’s when you can check the real source of truth as to how your website will look to others – and that’s using the built-in domain with ?noredirect added to the end (or if your site is already live, just go to your public website URL, e.g. jen-webb.com).
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