Shareable external preview links for unpublished (draft) content
Problem
In Optimizely CMS (SaaS) there is currently no way for content editors to generate a long-lived, shareable preview link for unpublished/draft content that external stakeholders can open without a CMS / Opti ID account.
Current limitations:
The official preview token expires in only 5–10 minutes.
The only official recommendation is to give stakeholders limited CMS access so they can open the page in Visual Builder themselves.
This creates friction for external reviews (clients, legal, marketing stakeholders, executives, agencies, etc.) and forces customers to either:
Maintain a separate staging environment, or
Build custom workarounds.
This was a solved problem on classic CMS (via the External Review / Advanced Reviews functionality) but is missing in SaaS.
Proposed Solution
Allow content editors to generate secure, shareable preview links directly from Visual Builder (or a dedicated gadget) with the following capabilities:
Link shows the exact current draft version of the page
No CMS / Opti ID login required for the recipient
Configurable expiration (e.g. 24 hours, 48 hours, 7 days)
Optional PIN / password protection
Ability for the editor to revoke the link at any time
Works on the production environment (no need for a separate staging site)
Preferably supports visitor groups / personalization if used on the page
Business Value
Significantly improves the content review & approval process
Removes the need for external stakeholders to have CMS accounts
Reduces reliance on separate staging environments just for preview purposes
Aligns SaaS with capabilities that many customers already had (or expected) from previous Optimizely versions
Very common request across agencies and enterprise customers
Additional context
Several customers and partners (including us) have already confirmed with Optimizely Solution Architects that this is currently not possible natively. A clean, first-party solution would be highly valued.