When someone is considering your online course or digital download, offering a preview (or free sample) can help them feel confident before buying.
With Podia, you can mark specific lessons or files as previewable, allowing anyone—even visitors without an account—to access them.
Previewable lessons and files appear directly on your product sales page and can be opened without signing up. This gives potential customers a quick look at your content and helps them understand what they’ll get when they join your course.
Enabling preview for lessons and files
Previews can be enabled just for downloads and online courses product types.
Here's how to enable preview for specific files and lessons:
From your home feed, click on your site name and select Admin from the dropdown menu.
From the Admin dashboard, click Products in the sidebar menu.
Click the Edit icon next to the product you want to update.
Click "..." next to the file/lesson you want to enable preview for and choose Enable preview from the dropdown menu.
You can enable preview for as many lessons and files as you'd like.
Adding a "Contents" page section to your product sales page
To allow people to preview those lessons after accessing your site pages, you will need to add a Contents page section to your product sales page.
A Contents page section will display the content of your product, including the files/lessons you enabled preview for.
Here's how to add a "Contents" page section to your product sales page:
From your home feed, click on your site name and select Admin from the dropdown menu.
From the Admin dashboard, click Products in the sidebar menu.
Click on "..." next to the product you want to edit and select "Edit page".
Click the "+" symbol to add a page section and choose Contents from the left-hand menu.
And that's it! Once a "Contents" page section is added to your page, lessons and files you enabled preview for will automatically show up.
What will visitors see?
When visitors and/or potential customers visit your product sales page they will view a preview button next to each of the lessons/files you enabled preview for.
Clicking on Preview will allow potential customers - even those who do not have an account yet - to view the lesson/file.
From there, we will also give them the option to Buy the course or to go back to the sales page.
If visitors click on lessons or files that aren't set for preview, they'll see a message reminding them to buy the product for full access:
FAQs
Can I make one lesson free and keep the rest of my course paid?
Can I make one lesson free and keep the rest of my course paid?
Yes, you can make specific lessons previewable. Previewable lessons can be viewed by visitors before they purchase or enroll, while the rest of the course stays locked behind the normal product access.
Can I make portions of lessons or snippets of video lessons previewable?
Can I make portions of lessons or snippets of video lessons previewable?
No — you can’t make only part of a lesson previewable. If a lesson is marked as previewable, the entire lesson becomes available to visitors.
If you want to share only a portion of your content, we recommend creating a separate “Preview Lesson” at the start of your course.
You can put a shortened version of the lesson, a clip of the video, or a small sample of the material there for visitors to preview before purchasing.
Can I enable preview for all product types?
Can I enable preview for all product types?
No. Only online courses and download product types support the preview feature.
Can I enable preview for waitlist products?
Can I enable preview for waitlist products?
No. Previewing content for waitlist products isn’t supported, since the product content isn’t accessible while the product is in waitlist mode.
If preview is enabled on lessons or files in a waitlist product, visitors may run into 404 page not found errors when trying to access that content.
Why are my previewable lessons not showing on my sales page?
Why are my previewable lessons not showing on my sales page?
Preview lessons need to be shown through the product’s sales page in the table of contents section. If this section is deleted, the previewable content will not show.
Preview behavior can also change if the product is waitlisted, closed, or in draft mode.