Previewing Content Changes In Your Work With document.designMode — Smashing Magazine

So, you just deployed a change to your website. Congrats! Everything went according to plan, but now that you look at your work in production, you start questioning your change. Perhaps that change was as simple as a new heading and doesn’t seem to fit the space. Maybe you added an image, but it just doesn’t feel right in that specific context.

What do you do? Do you start deploying more changes? It’s not like you need to crack open Illustrator or Figma to mock up a small change like that, but previewing your changes before deploying them would still be helpful.

Enter document.designMode. It’s not new. In fact, I just recently came across it for the first time and had one of those “Wait, this exists?” moments because it’s a tool we’ve had forever, even in Internet Explorer 6. But for some reason, I’m only now hearing about it, and it turns out that many of my colleagues are also hearing about it for the first time.

What exactly is document.designMode? Perhaps a little video demonstration can help demonstrate how it allows you to make direct edits to a page.

At its simplest, document.designMode makes webpages editable, similar to a text editor. I’d say it’s like having an edit mode for the web — one can click anywhere on a webpage to modify existing text, move stuff around, and even delete elements. It’s like having Apple’s “Distraction Control” feature at your beck and call.

I think this is a useful tool for developers, designers, clients, and regular users alike.

You might be wondering if this is just like contentEditable because, at a glance, they both look similar. But no, the two serve different purposes. contentEditable is more focused on making a specific element editable, while document.designMode makes the whole page editable.

Enabling document.designMode can be done in the browser’s developer tools:

1. Right-click anywhere on a webpage and click Inspect.
2. Click the Console tab.
3. Type document.designMode = "on" and press Enter.

To turn it off, refresh the page. That’s it.

Another method is to create a bookmark that activates the mode when clicked:

1. Create a new bookmark in your browser.
2. You can name it whatever, e.g., “EDIT_MODE”.
3. Input this code in the URL field:

javascript:(function(){document.designMode = document.designMode === 'on' ? 'off' : 'on';})();

And now you have a switch that toggles document.designMode on and off.

Use Cases

There are many interesting, creative, and useful ways to use this tool.

Basic Content Editing

I dare say this is the core purpose of document.designMode, which is essentially editing any text element of a webpage for whatever reason. It could be the headings, paragraphs, or even bullet points. Whatever the case, your browser effectively becomes a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editor, where you can make and preview changes on the spot.

Landing Page A/B Testing

Let’s say we have a product website with an existing copy, but then you check out your competitors, and their copy looks more appealing. Naturally, you’d want to test it out. Instead of editing on the back end or taking notes for later, you can use document.designMode to immediately see how that copy variation would fit into the landing page layout and then easily compare and contrast the two versions.

This could also be useful for copywriters or solo developers.

SEO Title And Meta Description

Everyone wants their website to rank at the top of search results because that means more traffic. However, as broad as SEO is as a practice, the