WordPress Preview Not Working: Here’s How You Fix it

This problem is annoying, it really is. I am talking about writing a blog post, saving your draft and then when you click “Preview”, your blog post just simply won’t appear.

It could either be that at that point you get a 404 Error message or maybe you’ll just see the WordPress symbol on your screen with the message “Generating preview…” and nothing seems to happen at all.

So how can we fix this?

Let’s dive right into it!

 

Chances are you are using the new Gutenberg editor

I have been in the blogging game for many years. And to be completely honest, I am still mainly using the old Classic editor because I find it much easier and more stable to use.

Let’s take our annoying “Can not preview” as an example.

In fact, when using the Classic editor, I never even encounter this problem in the first place.

So if you do indeed have this problem, chances are you are using the new Gutenberg editor.

Ok, great. But how to fix it then?

 

Fix the preview function on the Gutenberg editor

If you can’t preview your blog post on the Gutenberg editor, there are a couple of things you can try to make this work again.

First of all, make sure your draft is saved and once that is done, log out of your WordPress and then log in again.

Most likely that is not going to be enough to solve the issue.

So, the next thing you want to try is to clear the cache of both your browser and also your WordPress website.

Chances are that you have some plugin installed that is managing the cache for you. Look out for plugins like WP Rocket, WP Supercache or some other popular options like W3 Total Cache.

If you do have one of these installed, then their caching functionality could be the root cause of this problem. Clear the plugins cache.

Oh, and by the way, if you are also using a CDN, maybe something like Cloudflare, it is a good idea to also head over there and purge the cache there as well.

Now, as for clearing your browser’s cache, if you are working in Google Chrome (which probably will be the case for most of you), to clear your cache, go to “Chrome” —> “Clear Browsing Data” and clear your cache from there (both Basic and Advanced!).

 

My WordPress Preview is still broken: What now?

If your WordPress preview is still not working, there are three more things you can do.

The first thing you can do (this actually always works for me in the Gutenberg editor), you can simply access your Preview from a different location.

Different location? What do you mean?

Well, instead of using the Preview button that you have on the top right corner when writing a draft, please go to your WordPress Dashboard and there click on “Posts” —> “All Posts”.

Now, you should see a list with all your blog posts including the blog post that you are currently working on and where your preview is apparently broken.

Now, when you hoover over the blog post title of that very post, you will see that it is also possible to preview your blog post from here. That usually works!

The second workaround for this truly annoying problem is to simply go back (temporarily) to the classic editor.

With fresh installs of WordPress, only the Gutenberg editor is installed.

However, you can easily revert back to the Classic editor by installing the Classic Editor plugin.

To do so, again, just go back to your WordPress dashboard, then you select “Plugins” and then you click on “Add new”.

Now, just simply search for Classic editor and install it.

You will now have the option to easily switch between the two editors.

The third thing you can do when you are about to go crazy and still have to deal with this rather annoying issue is to simply switch browsers.

If you are on Google Chrome, you might want to try Firefox instead.

Another thing that I found to be useful is to always really close the whole browser rather than just closing tabs on your browser.

This especially holds true when clearing the cache of your browser.

I feel like sometimes the browser can’t entirely clear the cache (even when you clear the cache from the settings) if you don’t entirely close the whole browser and reopen it.

I was about to wrap this post up, when two more possible fixes came to my mind.

One more thing you you could try is to deactivate all plugins and check if the problem still persists (you maybe want o make a backup of your WordPress website first before you are doing this).

This way, you can easily find out if the problem source of this problem is actually one of your plugins.

If it does indeed work when all plugins are deactivated, you can be sure that a plugin is causing this issue.

Then, reactivate one plugin at the time, check the preview function after each reactivation and like this you can easily find out which plugin is at the source of this problem.

The very last thing you can try to fix the problem is to check whether you are using the newest version of WordPress. If you don’t, then proceed with the update.

If you are lucky, this will solve your problem (finally!)