How to test your monday.com client portal before clients see it

A client portal shows different things to different people. Acme sees Acme's projects, Globex sees Globex's invoices, and a premium client may see a page that others don't. That is the point of a portal, but it also means a change that looks right for one client can look wrong, or empty, for another. Client Portal Builder for monday.com separates your work in progress from what clients see, and lets you look at both through the eyes of any client. This guide shows how to use those tools to test a portal before launch and before every change you publish.

Draft

Your changes stay a draft until you publish

Every change you make in the Client Portal Builder view is saved automatically to a working draft. Clients keep seeing the published portal until you click Publish. As long as the draft differs from what is live, a Draft label appears next to the portal name.

Rearrange pages, rewrite texts or configure a new board section in the draft while clients continue using the published portal configuration. Publishing controls when those configuration changes reach clients.

Preview

Open the portal as a client

Click Preview draft in the Builder to open the working draft in a new window, exactly as a client would see it, with their name, their board items and their conditions applied. A banner at the bottom of the window shows which version you are looking at and for which client.

Check more than one client

By default, the preview uses the first client on your Clients Board. Use Change preview client to pick another one, and the app remembers your choice for the next preview.

Switching clients is the quickest way to check the parts of a portal that depend on who signs in: board sources that filter items by client, placeholders such as {{client.name}}, and page and section conditions based on a client's status. The slider below shows the same Projects page previewed for two clients.

Use a small set of test cases

Choose clients and sample items that cover the differences in your portal, rather than checking only your favourite client:

Preview a specific client from their item

When a client reports that something looks off, you don't need to change the preview client in the Builder. Open their item on the Clients Board, switch to the Client Settings view and click Preview draft, or Preview published portal from the arrow next to it. The preview opens for exactly that client, so you see what they see.

Draft vs. published

Compare your draft with what is live

Before you publish, open both versions for the same client and compare them side by side. In the example below, the draft moves the next check-in from Thursday to Friday. The published portal still shows the old date, so clients see the change only after publishing.

Visibility

Keep unfinished pages out of sight

Sometimes a bigger change takes longer than one session, but you still need to publish a quick fix elsewhere in the meantime. That's what Hide page and Hide section are for. You'll find them in the three-dot menu of a page or section. A hidden page or section stays in the Builder, so you can keep working on it, but it isn't part of the portal when you publish.

Mobile layout

Check the phone layout

Many clients open the portal from a link in an email on their phone. On small screens, the navigation turns into a top bar with a menu, and tables and cards stack differently. Resize the preview window, or use your browser's device toolbar, to check that wide tables, long texts and teaser cards still work on a narrow screen.

Test client

Test sign-in and interactions with a test client

A preview opens the portal directly, without a login. That's convenient, but it skips everything that happens before a client is signed in: the login page, the invitation, password resets and Google sign-in.

To test those, add a test client to your Clients Board, connect it to a few sample items and give it a login method with an email address you control. Then sign in on your portal's address in a private browser window, as your clients do. When you don't need it, turn the test client off with the Enabled toggle in its Client Settings view.

Once signed in, test the interactions your portal offers using those sample items:

After publishing

Know when changes reach clients

Changes to the portal are live for clients as soon as you publish. Changes on your boards don't need a publish at all, because the portal reads them from monday.com.

One exception: if you enable the cache in the portal settings to speed up loading, changes on the Clients Board can take up to three minutes to reach clients. Draft previews are not affected by the cache, so if a client doesn't see a change yet that your preview shows, give it a few minutes.

Clean up

Remove portals you only used for testing

If you built a separate portal to try out an idea, remove it once you are done. monday.com account admins can delete unused portals in the Client Portal Admin view. This removes the portal's settings, login methods and any connected domain. Your boards and app views stay untouched.

Checklist

A checklist before you publish

• Preview the draft as at least two clients, including one with few or no items.
• Check every page that has conditions with a client that meets them and one that doesn't.
• Compare the draft with the published portal for the same client.
• Hide pages and sections that aren't ready yet.
• Check the layout on a phone-sized window.
• Sign in once as a test client after changing login methods or the login page.
• Publish, then preview the published portal to confirm the result.

Summary

Publish with confidence

A client portal changes with every client who signs in, so testing it means looking at it as more than one client. The working draft keeps your changes private, previews show the draft or the live portal through any client's eyes, and hidden pages and sections let you publish in small steps. A few minutes of previewing before each publish saves you from the email that starts with "We can't see our projects anymore".