When editing content in the WordPress editor, you can use the preview option to view how it will be displayed in your site’s theme. This guide will show you how to preview your pages, posts, and templates to check how your changes will look on your website.
The page and post content of your site is added and edited from the WordPress editor, but the way that content is displayed on your site is controlled by your site’s theme. Preview a page or post to view how your site displays your content with all of the formatting elements of your theme applied.
You can preview a page or post from the editor by following these steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Click on Pages or Posts.
- Click on the title of the page or post you want to preview to open it in the editor.
- Click on the “View” icon (it looks like an open laptop) at the top of the screen, next to the “Publish” button.
- Select “Preview in new tab“.
A preview of your page or post will open in a new browser tab to display how the content will look on your site. If you make any changes in the editor after previewing, you’ll need to click “Save draft” (for draft posts) or “Update” (for published posts) and refresh the preview tab in your browser to view the changes applied to the page or post preview.
You can also use the View menu to change the format the WordPress editor uses to display your content by following these steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Click on Pages or Posts.
- Click on the title of the page or post you want to preview to open it in the editor.
- Click on the “View” icon (the silhouette of an open laptop) at the top of the screen, next to the “Publish” button.
- Select the “Desktop“, “Tablet“, or “Mobile” option in the View menu.
You can preview your page with the template applied from the Settings sidebar when editing the content of the page.
If you do not see the sidebar on the right, click the Settings icon in the top right corner to bring up the settings. This icon looks like a square with two uneven columns:
To preview a template from the editor:
- Visit your dashboard.
- Click on Pages or Posts and select the page or post for which you want to preview the template.
- In the Settings sidebar on the right, locate the Template section and click on the template name (1).
- Click on the “Template preview” option (2).
- You can view the page or post content with header, footer and any other template parts applied.
The following video demonstrates how to preview the page template from the WordPress editor. When the “Template preview” option is selected, the header and footer will display in the editor, showcasing how the full page looks on the site.
