Preview and check a test before launch

The screenshots in Varly are a quick first look. The preview shows the test on your real site, with your real menus, pop-ups and cookie banner, on any phone, tablet or computer. Check it there before you launch.

Open the preview

1. Go to Optimize → Experiments and open the test.
2. Under Preview on your site, click Open preview, or click Copy to copy the link.
3. Your page opens with a dark bar in the bottom-left corner. It shows "Varly preview:", the test name and the version you are looking at.
4. Click Original or a variant name in the bar to switch versions. The page changes right away, without reloading. For a multivariate test, the bar has a dropdown for each part, so you can put together any combination.

Click around

The preview stays on while you browse your site in the same tab, so you can add a product to the cart or open a menu. The changes show wherever the elements the test changes are on the page. The preview stays on until you click Exit in the bar.

Click Hide to make the bar smaller. Click the bar's title (or Show) to bring it back.

Share the link

As you switch versions, the address in your browser changes too, so you can share exactly the version you are looking at. Click Copy link in the bar to copy it. Anyone who opens the link sees that version on your site: a colleague, a developer or your client. The preview only works on your site's own domains.

During a preview Varly measures nothing. Preview visits don't count in heatmaps, recordings or test results, and the preview works whether or not you accept cookies.

Check on mobile

Open the preview link on your own phone, for example by sending it to yourself. In Varly you can also look at the screenshots for Desktop, Tablet and Mobile, but a real device shows things a screenshot can't:

• Is the change visible without scrolling too far?
• Does text still fit, or does it wrap badly or overlap?
• Do sticky bars, menus and pop-ups still sit in the right place?
• Do buttons and the add-to-cart flow still work?

A short QA checklist

Before you tick the box in the launch checklist, check:

1. Every version on desktop, tablet and mobile.
2. Text and prices: no typos, and the right language.
3. At least two different pages, if the test runs on a group of similar pages (for example two product pages).
4. The warnings under Check before launch on the experiment page.
5. That the original in the preview looks exactly like your normal site.

Common problems

• No bar appears. Check that tracking is on (Install → 3. Turn tracking on); with tracking off, the snippet does nothing. Check that the snippet is installed on this page, and that you opened the link on one of the domains under Settings → Tracking & privacy → Domains.
• The bar appears, but nothing changes. The page may look different from the one the AI built on, or the element may be added later by another script. Look at Check before launch, and rebuild the test if needed. See Why is my test not showing?.
• You keep seeing the preview. The preview stays on in that tab until you click Exit. You can also add ?varly_preview=off to the address.
• The link opens the wrong domain. The link uses the first domain of your site. Replace the domain in the link with another one from your Domains list, and keep everything after it.