You go to edit your Visual Editor test/target, and the page looks broken. What do you do?

This document explains the Live Reload feature of the Visual Editor.

By default, the Visual Editor caches every page that we build experiments on.

Not every page can be immediately loaded - for example, a Basket page may require items to be added to the cart, or a My Account page may require a login to take place.

Unless your state happens to be perfect, it's entirely possible that the page wouldn't load if you were to navigate directly to it.

By caching the page, we can ensure that the HTML is always consistent, and the UI always loads some relevant content for you to edit.

This isn't always perfect though - sometimes the caching of pages doesn't work as expected, Javascript doesn't execute at the right moment, files are dependent on a time-sensitive state, etc., and so the page doesn't load correctly.

This is where our Live Reload option is useful. As the name suggests, this allows you to load any webpage "live". As long as you can navigate to the page, this feature will allow you to see the live page, and have it load correctly.

There are two different places where you can enable Live Reload. Either in the editor itself or in Account Settings as a global value.

In the top-right corner, you'll find a Reload Page button. Simply click it, and the page will reload, fresh, from the URL you provided when creating the test.

In Account Overview, under Account Flags, you'll find this option.

To change it, click the Edit icon in the top-right corner of the section, change the value, and click Save once you're happy.

From that point onwards, any test you edit will default to using the live page as opposed to any cached versions.