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Save a Template as a Draft, and Never Lose One to a Disconnect Again

You can now park a template as a draft before it ever goes to Meta, come back to it later, and publish it when it is ready. And if a WhatsApp number is disconnected, its templates are no longer deleted: they are kept as drafts so you can put them back on a new number.

Write it now, send it later​

Building a template used to be all or nothing. You either submitted it to Meta for approval or you lost your work.

Now the template builder has Save as draft next to Submit for approval. A draft:

  • never goes to Meta, so it cannot be rejected,
  • keeps everything you put in it - body, header, footer, buttons, variables, carousel cards, uploaded media,
  • can be edited as many times as you like.

Drafts live in their own Drafts tab in the template library, so they never clutter the templates you actually send with.

Publishing a draft​

Open a draft, press Edit, and it opens in the builder exactly as you left it. When you are happy, publish it onto a connected WhatsApp number and it goes to Meta for approval like any new template.

Carousel drafts work the same way.

A couple of things worth knowing:

  • Publishing sends the template to Meta as a new template, so it goes through review again.
  • If the name is already taken on the number you are publishing to, Waplify stops and tells you rather than letting Meta reject it.

Your templates survive a disconnected number​

This is the part that used to hurt.

When a WhatsApp number was disconnected - by you, by an admin, or by Meta severing it - every template on that number was deleted. The body copy, the buttons, the variable setup, the carousel cards and the media you uploaded all went with it, and there was no undo.

Now those templates are kept as drafts instead. They show up in the Drafts tab labelled with the number they used to live on, and you can publish them onto a new number whenever you are ready.

The same applies when a template disappears on Meta's side: it is drafted, not deleted.

And if you reconnect the same number later, Waplify recognises the drafts it rescued from it and quietly makes them live again.

Good to know​

  • A draft carries no WhatsApp number until you publish it, which is why a draft and a live template are allowed to share a name.
  • Drafts cannot be sent - not from a campaign, a sequence, the inbox, a flow, or the API. Every send path checks that a template is approved first.
  • Everything else in the disconnect cleanup is unchanged. Only templates are preserved, because they are the one thing you cannot get back.