Site Privacy - Make a Private site Public

The benefits and strategy of making your site content public.

Benefits

Making your content public helps you:

Remove friction from self-service experience.
Empower current and prospective customers to find information easily.
Reduce Support tickets by letting customers self-serve.
Support customers throughout their entire life cycle: discovery, decision, and engagement.
Control the narrative around your brand, because customers do not have to get information from other sites.
Direct users to your site with Expert's built-in SEO functionality.

Gather baseline data about your private site. This will help you measure whether making content public was successful, and quantifying the results of that success in ways that make sense for you and your stakeholders.
Create a Communications Plan to let your end users know once your content is accessible without a login.
- Promote the change
  - Marketing site
  - Blog post
  - Social media announcement

Review all Categories, and ensure appropriate sub-pages are also intended for public consumption.
For public sections, change the page privacy to Semi-Public.
Consider how you want to handle private content within a public page (for example, a note just for employees that you do not want customers to see).
- For small blocks of text, use conditional content to make certain page content viewable only to specified users.
- For larger blocks of text, or long articles, it can make sense to move the content to a separate page. For example, you could create a Guide page that is set to Private, and put internal-only documentation there.

Review sections of the site not intended for public consumption.
For non-public sections, change the page privacy to Private or Semi-Private.

Create a Viewer role and give it permission for the Semi-Public sections. This will allow you to confirm the content that is available to the public.
Confirm that any internal Conditional Content is not visible to the public (Viewer) audience.

Go to Dashboard > Link Manager to review links on public pages to ensure they are not broken.
Review site configuration details in the Control Panel.
Add Google Analytics configurations in Control Panel, if not set already.
Deselect “Make site private (users must sign in)”.
Let users know about the site change via your marketing site, blog, and social media.

Deselecting "Make site private" will make your site public. Make sure your content is permissioned correctly before completing this step.

Update public content regularly to keep it accurate and relevant.
Link content internally so users can navigate to other helpful articles within your site.
Use analytics and report data to improve your content.