Troubleshooting: Can't load a password-protected, gated, or session-specific page in the Editor

This article will help you:

Figure out why pages might not load in the Editor
Figure out why you can't log into your page within the Editor
Load password-protected, Intranet, or gated pages in the Editor
Load session-specific content, like a shopping cart, in the Editor

Are you unable to log into a page that's password-protected, session-specific, or behind basic authentication with the Optimizely Editor? If your site is password-protected, behind basic authentication, or requires session-specific information to access certain pages, those pages will not immediately load in the Editor.

Password-protected pages and pages behind basic authentication might include Intranet pages, staging sites behind firewalls, and pages that are gated or available only to logged-in visitors. Pages that require session-specific information to load include shopping carts.

In either case, here's how to give the Optimizely Editor access to the necessary cookies or session-specific information it needs to load the page correctly:

Open your site in a browser tab and navigate to the page you want to edit. To get to the page, you might need to log in, complete a portion of a form or add an item to your cart if you are trying to load a checkout page. Take the exact steps that get you to the exact page that you want to load in the Editor.
Copy the URL of the page.
Load Optimizely in an adjacent browser tab where you had the page open.
Create an experiment using the copied URL of the page you want to test.

Why does this technique work? The Editor will load the page as it would appear if you went directly to the URL in another tab. If you can repeatedly load the page into a separate tab outside of Optimizely, Optimizely should be able to load the page within the Editor.

What's going on behind the scenes? The key is to allow Optimizely to retrieve session-specific information from the browser. If this information is passed through cookies, using an adjacent tab or the same tab will work. If the session-specific information is passed through Session Storage, you'll need to load the Editor in the same tab where you just loaded your page.

If you're sure that your page can load in the same browser tab (or an adjacent one), but your page still doesn’t load, check the right-hand side of the browser's URL bar for a shield icon that indicates you are in "compatibility mode". Compatibility mode will prevent the solution above from working as expected. To resolve compatibility mode issues, follow the steps listed in this article.