How can you unpublish pages?
Asked by Pat Hauser:

I needed to see how my page looked published so I published and now want to unpublish the page so others can't see it. How can I do that?


Answers:
author: George Tunnicliffe
body: Has somebody created a feature request to undo this? Accidentally published a document that needed a 'launch' and had to do all the copy and paste.

On the face of it...doesn't seem difficult


author: Brad Swerdfeger
body: Worst case, please just add a confirm state to the initial publish. It is really easy to mis-click that due to muscle memory.


author: Dwight Aalse
body: Maybe using the lock ? to apply restrictions can help restrict access to the page.


author: Rich Yarbrough
body: Why go to all the trouble of copying and pasting the content in edit mode? Use the page copy feature and don't publish the new page.

1. Use copy feature to copy current (published) page to new (draft) page

2. Delete "Copy of" from the page title

3. Save **without publishing** the new page

4. Delete the old page

My guess as to why Atlassian hasn't created an unpublish feature is because the workaround described above literally takes about 30 seconds (although, admittedly, an 'Unpublish' feature would be nice).


author: John Tolle
body: I'm not sure why this hasn't been created already (as in many years ago!) but I put in a support request which was then converted to a feature request you can all vote on and watch (and please do whether you were already participating above or just found this in a web search):

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-76140>


author: Avinash Bhagawati _Appfire_
body: Hi [@Pat Hauser](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3079552) ,

It is always recommended to use [Preview](https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/create-edit-and-publish-724764831.html#Create,edit,andpublish-Preview) Option to see how will be page look once it is published.

Currently, you can not revert back to unpublished state and you will be able to revert back to last version of the page.

Also you can try out a workaround to avoid duplicate pages and to have unpublished page for the same. Please try this workaround on test space or instance to check whether it will meet your requirement or not.

1. Access the affected page
2. Enter edit mode
3. Copy all the page content
4. Exit edit mode
5. Create a new page
6. Paste the content
7. Do not publish the page
8. Go back to the affected page
9. Delete it
10. Proceed to keep working with the newly created page

Thanks,

Avinash

comments: author: Mohamed Shakir
body: This is a bit much to just unpublish and existing page.. is there an easier way to just decommission a page without having to cut and paste content?


author: Jason Smith
body: Agree with too much to unpublish, it is something I also had to learn the hard way (this is what happens when you have no training and self teach - well in mi instance lol).

The way he outlined is the only way currently. Copy all content to new page and don't publish.

To "Preview" a page it is at the ellipsis at the bottom right of the screen, see image below for example.

<br />

![Page.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/105713i9F9C629EE3C9296F/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Page.png")


author: Lorena
body: Agreed. This is absurd. Maybe a page needs to be temporarily removed (unpublish) before it can go live again. I was so sure that when I googled I would find some hidden setting somewhere that would do this, but not this ridiculous work around.


author: Kelly Becker
body: With layout, you can't copy all. I just had to archive an accidently published complex page and now have to figure out how to find time to best recreate it one element at a time. Ugh.


author: Scott Davis
body: Looking back at this being requested for the past 4/5 years and wondering why it's not yet done. Simple feature, thousands of use cases. [@Kelly Becker](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5266500) makes a perfect point that this doesn't work with a full layout.   

Please add a very simple 'Unpublish' button.


Tags: atl-gruland