Publish your site
Editing changes your draft. Publish is what changes the live site. Nothing a visitor sees moves until you press it.
Publishing
Press Publish in the builder. That page goes live.
Before you do, Changes since publish shows what is about to change - useful when you have been editing for a while, or when someone else has been editing too.
Page by page
Publishing works per page. A page can be:
- published - live and visible,
- unpublished - it exists in the builder but is not on the live site.
So you can build a new page over a week, publishing nothing, then publish it when it is ready. And you can pull a page off the live site without deleting it.
What does not need publishing
Some things are live the moment you save them, because they are not page content:
- your global header and footer - editing them updates every page at once,
- products, blog posts, menu items, bookings and other data,
- most Settings.
A pre-publish checklist
- Look at the page on Mobile. Most of your visitors will.
- Click your own links, especially the button in the header.
- Check Page Settings has a Meta Title and Meta Description.
- Confirm the page is in the menu, if it should be.
Snapshots
Snapshots saves a restore point you can come back to. Take one before a big rework - it is much faster than undoing thirty steps.
Dev Mode
With Dev Mode on, every change publishes automatically. Convenient while you are setting up, and exactly what you do not want on a site real people are visiting. Turn it off before you have an audience.
Good to know
- Published does not mean findable. Search engines take days to weeks. Publishing is the start of that clock.
- If the live site looks stale, it is nearly always an unpublished page or a browser cache - reload with a hard refresh before assuming anything is broken. See Site not showing.