I recently launched a product, and, as you can already tell by this post’s title, I did it using ClickFunnels, which happens to be one of my favorite tools.
The launch had a limited inventory and, luckily for me, it sold out. To keep visitors from stumbling upon the funnel after the sale—and prevent my competitors from “getting inspired by” the landing pages—I wanted to take them offline.
I tried archiving the funnel as the ClickFunnels team had recommended in the help section:
Removing a funnel from your account can be achieved by archiving your funnel. Archiving a funnel will place the funnel in the Archived tab of the Funnels Page and will not count towards your account limit and it can be restored at a later time.
ClickFunnels help section
Though that did put the funnel in question under the “Archived” tab, just like the documentation said, its pages continued to be accessible for all visitors (which, if you ask me, didn’t make any sense!).
The design, copy, and steps in this funnel had worked so well that I didn’t want to delete it. Going into each of the pages and saving every section as a template in the “My Sections” gallery probably could have done it, but it would have been a lot of toil for something (seemingly) simple.
“There must be a better way…” I thought to myself.
So I set out to do what I usually do when something like this happens: I wrote to their support team (on chat) and told them about my case.
Here’s what I got back from them:
I understand you are wanting to ‘remove’ some pages so others can’t access them. The easiest method would be to add a minute timer element to the page, set all timers at zero, then use a Redirect URL to send them somewhere else. The old page will load for just a second, then redirect.
https://help.clickfunnels.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009158554-Minute-Timer-Element
ClickFunnels support rep
That confirmed my suspicions.
Archiving a funnel in won’t take its pages offline. Since ClickFunnels doesn’t have a feature for this right out of the box, you’ll have to use the following workaround:
To take your funnel (or any funnel step in it) offline, add a Countdown Timer element anywhere on the page, configure it to an end date and end time in the past, and choose what URL to redirect its visitors to.
Is this ideal? Not necessarily. When I open the URL of the funnel step that I took offline, I can still see the page “flashing” for a few seconds before the URL redirect kicks in.
Did it work? You bet. For the time being, this is one of your best options to take a funnel’s steps offline without deleting the pages for them.
For those of you who don’t have time to dig into the documentation, here’s the instructional video you need to get this done:
Pro tip: Give the Countdown Timer element a bright and contrasting background, something like red or green, to make it easy for you to identify and remove if/when needed.
In the future, I’d love to see a simple toggle for taking a funnel online/offline from ClickFunnels. It should probably come with a disclaimer, as hitting it by mistake can wreak a lot of havoc on a high-traffic landing page.
But it will definitely save users like you and me from needing to use the Countdown Timer element as a workaround.
Found another (possibly smarter) way to achieve this? Share it with the rest of this post’s readers and me in the comments below!
