How to preview a theme and customization with others

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  hongtaobai · Member · Jul 11, 2015 at 5:56 am

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  Here is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to change my current site to using a different theme and customization.

  I’d like to make the change privately so that I can send a private link of my site to some friends and hear feedbacks from them. With that said, I’d like to keep changing it and getting feedbacks from my friends, while I’m doing that other people who don’t have the private link still visit my site use the official link and shouldn’t see my private changes.

  Is this possible? If yes, how can I do it?

  Thank you

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  mojourner · Member · Jul 11, 2015 at 6:54 am

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  You can do this if your WordPress.com site privacy is set to Private and then you can invite your friends to view it. They’ll need to have a WordPress.com account in order to log in and see your site.

  Anyone else who lands on your site, will only see a log-in page that says your site is Private. Even if they have a WordPress.com account, if you haven’t invited them, they won’t see your site after logging in.

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  hongtaobai · Member · Jul 11, 2015 at 7:09 am

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  Thank you for your reply!

  What if I still want anyone else to see my old theme. Basically, I think I want two themes for my site at same time, one for public and the other for private preview, both with same site content but different look and feel.

  Is this possible?

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  auxclass · Member · Jul 11, 2015 at 7:16 am

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  You would need to set up a second test blog and do the testing and development on the second blog – then transfer the changes to the main blog – sorry no shortcut

  Export some of your content from the old site and import the contents to the the second site that is set to “Private” – that is to prevent search engines from seeing duplicate content and getting confused and your site gets downgraded