Can I preview a personalized experience on my Hydrogen storefront before publishing?
Before my team publishes a new hero experience, our stakeholders want to see it live on the actual storefront, in the right colour and layout, not just in the editor preview. We have a proper review step and people want to click around the real Hydrogen pages first.
How does preview work for this, and what needs to be set up for it to show the personalized version rather than the default one?
2 answers
You generate a preview link from the experience or experiment editor. That link is valid for 24 hours, you can share it with stakeholders, and you can regenerate it if it expires or you need a fresh one. When someone opens it on the storefront, a widget appears in the bottom-right showing exactly what is active for them, the experience, experiment, audience, variant, and locale, so reviewers can confirm they are actually looking at the intended variation and not the default.
Two requirements will bite you if they are off, so check them before you send the link around. The slots have to be integrated and the slot versions have to match between what you fetch and what the experience targets, and your domain has to be listed in the trusted origins, otherwise the preview will not resolve on your storefront. One more thing that looks like a bug but is not: if the experience is paused, preview shows the default slot content, so activate or leave it in draft rather than paused when you want reviewers to see the variant.
The trusted origins was exactly it, our staging domain was not listed so the widget never showed. Added it and the preview works now, thank you.