Get to know the survey editor
Every survey has three tabs: General, Editor, Analytics. This page covers the Editor tab, its sections, and how saving and autosave work.
The three tabs
Open a survey from the dashboard and you land on one of three screens:
- General — the survey's settings (status, redirect, publish options).
- Editor — the survey's content: title, cover, questions, and its closing or result screens. This is the tab the rest of this section covers.
- Analytics — responses and metrics for this survey.
Sections in the Editor tab
The Editor tab's left-hand navigation changes with the survey's type:
| Survey type | Sections |
|---|---|
| Quick Vote | Welcome → Questions → Closing |
| Survey | Welcome → Questions → Closing → Skip Logic |
| Knowledge Quiz, Personality Test | Welcome → Questions → Results → Skip Logic |
Title and cover live in one section, Welcome — there is no separate Title tab or Cover tab. See Set your survey's title and cover.
Every section appears in the nav for every edition. On free, Skip Logic carries a Pro badge next to its label, but the section itself is still there — what changes between editions is whether that section does anything, not whether you can click it. See Send respondents to a different question with skip logic.
A Quick Vote survey only ever shows Welcome, Questions and Closing. Results and Skip Logic belong to the other three types.
Saving
Saving is one action, not a draft/publish split: click Save and the survey's live content is written immediately — there is no separate "publish" step.
Before it writes, Save checks three things and blocks if any fail:
- The survey has a title.
- Every question has a title.
- Every question that needs answer options (multiple choice, multi-select, dropdown, image choice, multi-image choice, yes/no) has at least one option with text in it. Options left completely blank are dropped automatically before this check runs, so an empty option row never blocks a save on its own.
If a question fails one of these checks, a dialog offers Save Anyway, which saves the survey with that question left out, or lets you go back and fix it.
Autosave and revisions
Autosave is separate from Save and never touches the live survey. Five seconds after you stop typing, the editor writes a snapshot of your in-progress work to a revision — not to the saved survey row. You still have to click Save for a change to go live.
The revision history behind this keeps:
- 1 autosave slot — each new autosave overwrites the last one.
- Up to 5 snapshot slots — created automatically at most once every 5 minutes.
That is 6 stored revisions at most per survey, none of them Pro-gated.
When you open a survey whose autosave is newer than what you last saved, a Restore Autosave? dialog appears with two options: Restore or Keep Current. Restoring loads that autosave's content into the open editor — it warns that your current unsaved changes will be replaced — but it still does not persist until you click Save. Choosing Keep Current dismisses the prompt for that specific revision; it will not ask again about the same one.
Going back to an earlier version
You are not limited to the newest autosave. The editor carries a Recent Versions list, which shows every stored revision with its type — Autosave, Snapshot or Manual — so you can pick one from further back.
- Find Recent Versions in the editor. While autosave is running the same spot reports its state instead: Autosaving…, Autosaved, or Autosave failed.
- Click the version you want.
- A Restore This Version? dialog warns that your current unsaved changes will be replaced. Confirm it.
Restoring loads that version into the open editor. As with the autosave prompt, nothing is live until you click Save — so you can restore a version, look at it, and walk away without having changed the survey anyone sees.
Deleting a survey deletes its revisions along with it — there is no way to recover them afterward.
If a survey needs Pro
Opening a survey that uses a Pro-only feature on a free install shows a "Pro required" notice instead of the editor, and attempts to save it are rejected. This happens most often after importing a template with more than one question — see Add and manage questions.