Checking a variant on your live site with QA

QA lets you preview a draft experiment on your live website with a link, before you start it. Visitors never see it, nothing is tracked, and QA switches itself off after 3 days.

Use it to check a variant on the real site, on a phone, a tablet or another browser, before any visitor sees it, or to send a link to a colleague or client for sign-off. It works even when the website has no running experiments.

Start QA from the dashboard

1. 1Open the draft experiment.
2. 2Open the Start menu.
3. 3Choose Start QA.

On a draft, the menu has two items:

• Start QA: preview it on the live site with a link. Visitors never see it, nothing is tracked, and it ends after 3 days.
• Start experiment: show it to visitors and start measuring.

Once QA is on, the experiment page shows a QA preview panel with a link for each variant.

Start QA from the visual editor

1. 1Click Preview on another device in the editor's header. It is the button with the monitor and phone icon.
2. 2Choose Start QA.

While the experiment is in QA, the same button shows the preview link, a QR code, when QA ends, and Stop QA.

Preview on your phone or another browser

The QA preview panel on the experiment page has everything you need:

• A link for each variant. Use the copy button to copy it, or the QR code button to show a code you can scan with a phone.
• The Page field. This is the address the links open on. Change it to preview a different page of your site.
• When QA ends, shown as "QA ends" with a date and time.
• A reset link, for going back to normal in a browser that opened a preview.

Open a link and that browser shows the variant on your live site, with a small Pertento QA preview label and an Exit button.

The preview sticks. That browser keeps showing the variant on later pages and visits, until you press Exit, open the reset link, or QA ends.

Edit while in QA

An experiment in QA is still a draft in every other way. You can edit it, plan it, schedule it or delete it exactly as you would a draft.

When you edit it, reload the preview page to see the change. You don't need to do anything else.

Stop QA, or start the experiment

While the experiment is in QA, the Start menu offers two items:

• Stop QA: back to draft. The preview links stop working, and the label disappears from a browser on its next page load.
• Start experiment: starts it straight from QA. There's no need to stop QA first.

A schedule or a pipeline can also start an experiment that is in QA.

If you do neither, QA switches itself off after 3 days and the experiment goes back to draft. You can switch QA off and on again as often as you like, and switching it on again restarts the 3 days.

Leave a preview in your own browser

A browser that opened a link keeps the preview until QA ends. To go back to normal there sooner, do either of these in that browser:

• Press Exit on the Pertento QA preview label.
• Open the reset link from the QA preview panel.

Good to know

• Nothing reaches your reporting. QA leaves nothing in results, history, learnings or statistics, and it never reaches your server-side setup.
• The original page may flash first. The preview applies after the page has loaded, so you may briefly see the original before the variant appears. Real visitors in a running experiment don't get this delay.
• Activation rules are not simulated. The variant shows as soon as the page loads, even if the experiment is set to activate on a click, a scroll or similar.
• Linked surveys don't show. A survey tied to the experiment won't appear in a QA preview.
• Targeting still applies. If the experiment targets certain pages, devices or cookies, the preview follows those rules. A link opened on a page or device the experiment doesn't target shows nothing.
• A preview is not private. Anyone with a link can open it, and a variant in QA can be read in your website's code, just like a running one. Don't put anything confidential in a variant.
• QA publishes your website. Switching QA on or off publishes it, and so does saving an edit to an experiment in QA. A publish ships everything set on the website at that moment, including changes to a running experiment that you haven't enforced yet. See Making changes to a running experiment.

When QA isn't available

You can't start QA for:

• Archived or deleted experiments.
• Server-side experiments, because there's nothing to show in the browser. Your own code shows their variants.
• Redirect experiments without a URL rule and a destination. Add both, then start QA.
• An account without an active plan, or one that is paused because it has reached its session limit.

An experiment in QA also can't be ended or deployed, because it never ran. Start it or stop QA instead.

With an AI assistant

Assistants connected through the Pertento MCP connector, such as Claude or ChatGPT, can switch QA on and off too, and use the preview link to check their changes. See Using Pertento from an AI assistant.

To check a variant once the experiment is running, see Previewing a variant on another device.