Publishing your site

Publishing pushes your draft live so visitors see your latest work. This page explains exactly what publishing does, what it doesn't cover, and the draft-vs-live model behind it.

What publishing does

You work on a draft. Publishing takes that draft and makes it the live site — from the Site menu (Publish, or Republish once it's live) or from Settings → Hosting → Deploy. It covers everything you've changed:

• content you wrote directly in sections;
• page structure (added, removed, reordered, re-nested pages);
• section configuration and options;
• the site's settings, including theme and fonts.

After you publish, visitors see all of it. (Changes to the site's address and domain moves are the exception: they take effect at once, without publishing.)

If the publish changes the site's subscription, Confirm and publish comes first — "Review the change — nothing is charged or published until you confirm" — with Pay … & publish or Confirm & publish. A site that asks for something not yet paid for opens a Publish … screen that settles it, in order, and then publishes. At the end, the "Your site is live!" card can list notes about the publish, such as a service still being set up.

You publish the whole site at once

Publishing is all-or-nothing for the site: there's no per-page publishing and no scheduling content to go live at a set time. When you publish, the current draft becomes live in its entirety.

What you can do is keep a page out: Set as draft on a page (in the pages panel) leaves it — and every page under it — out of the published site until you mark it live and publish again. A section can be hidden the same way.

If you need something to appear at a particular moment, the workaround is linked content: keep the item in the library and add it to the site's folder when you're ready — it appears without a republish. See Content you write vs. content you link.

What doesn't need publishing

Linked content updates on its own:

• add an Article to the site's folder → it appears in the blog section;
• update a Person → the team directory reflects it;
• remove an item from a folder → it disappears from the site.

All of that happens without republishing — once the site has been published with the site's live records feature on (Settings → Features, where it's offered) — because the site reads linked content live from its source; a change can take a few minutes to show. An item with Draft mode on never shows. Publishing is only for the draft of your written-directly content and settings. See Displaying content from the library.

Draft vs. live, in one picture

Written-directly content waits in the draft until you publish. Linked content bypasses the draft entirely — it's always current.

Translation and publishing

⚠️ Publishing does not translate anything. Whatever is untranslated when you publish stays untranslated on the live site. Translate first — including the AI-assisted option in the editor — then publish. See Translating content.

What it costs

Building and keeping drafts is free. Publishing a site live is where pricing applies, and the price depends on the features you enable. See Site pricing.

Where to go next

• Domains — publish on your own address.
• Hosting and performance — what Uniweb handles for you.
• Site pricing