Preview and publish website changes
Review exactly what will go live, including page design, shared layout, collections, forms, and CMS items.
Understand what visitors see
The editor and its preview show your working draft. The live site uses the published page design, shared layout, collection structure, and forms. CMS items also have their own published content version. This lets you prepare changes without replacing the content visitors currently see.
Not every setting waits for publishing. Some saved settings, including metadata and site-level configuration, can affect the public site immediately. Read the setting’s own guidance rather than assuming every saved change is a private draft.
Review the draft
- Open each changed page in Preview. Check the wording, images, links, and desktop and mobile layouts.
- If the change uses CMS content, preview a real item and confirm its fields and references are present.
- Check shared header and footer changes on more than one page. If you changed site-wide styles, include pages with different layouts.
- Use the preview’s Open in new tab control when you need more space for review. A successful preview is a draft check, not proof that the live site has updated.
Choose changes to publish
- Open Publish site for the first publication or Publish changes for later updates.
- Review the pending changes and select the items to include. The screen can include pages, collections, forms, the common layout, and CMS items.
- Inspect change details and review any required related items. A page may depend on a collection or form that must be included for the page to work.
- If you changed the common layout, site styles, or the 404 page, confirm that the layout changes are included. Selecting only an individual page is not a substitute for publishing shared design changes.
- Review metadata warnings and publish the selected changes. Wait for the completion result; if some items fail, inspect the remaining changes and retry the affected items.
Check the public result
Open the live site after publishing. Visit the exact changed URL and test the relevant links, forms, and language versions. For a new CMS section, both its page/collection setup and the items you want visitors to see must be published. An item scheduled for a future date stays hidden until that date.
Take a page offline
Unpublish removes a page’s live version while keeping its draft editable; its public address returns a not-found page until it is published again. Deleting a page is a draft change that must be published to remove it publicly. Use the action that matches your intention, then update links that point to the removed page.