Putting your site online

While you are building, your site is real but private — only you and the people you invite can see it. Publishing is the step that puts what you have made in front of the world.

It is one button, and it is the whole ceremony.

What Publish does

It takes everything as it stands right now, builds a finished copy of every page, and puts that copy online at your web address.

The copy is finished before anyone visits — nothing is being assembled while a customer waits, and there is no machinery sitting behind your site that can seize up. That is also why a busy day is an ordinary day for it.

Visitors arrive over a secure connection. The padlock in the address bar is set up for you, on your Spanli address and on your own name if you buy one. You never see a certificate.

How long it takes

Usually a minute or two. You will see it working, and you will see when it is done.

You do not have to wait for it. Close the tab; it finishes without you.

After you publish

Your live site now shows what you published. Anything you change afterwards stays in your draft until you publish again — a half-finished idea is never sitting on the live site where a customer can find it.

Your project tells you when the live site has fallen behind what you have been working on, so you know there is something waiting to go out. See Drafts and published.

Publishing again

Every time. There is no cost to publishing, no limit on how often, and no reason to save it up. Change a price, publish. Fix a typo, publish.

Each publish is also a point you can go back to, so publishing often gives you more places to return to rather than fewer. See Putting things back.

Taking something down

Say what you want removed, then publish again. If you remove something and regret it, the earlier state of the site is one click away — you do not have to rebuild it.

If a publish does not work

It will tell you, rather than quietly leaving you with a broken site. Your live site keeps showing the last version that published successfully, so a failed attempt never takes you offline.

Ask in chat — "the publish did not work, what happened?" — and try again. If it keeps failing, see When the build stops.