Getting Started

New to BrightSite? Start here. What the product does, how to find your way around, and how to make your first change.

Updated September 23, 2026
On this page

BrightSite is a hosting platform for building and running a website: pages, a blog, forms, media, analytics and domains, all in one place. These guides assume no prior web experience.

The BrightSite home dashboard with the left sidebar, quick buttons for a new page, post, upload or form, cards for visitors, page views, items needing attention and published pages, a visitors chart, top pages and recent activity.
Your home dashboard gathers traffic, top pages and recent activity in one view.

Read these in order

If you are brand new, start at the top. The first few pages take about twenty minutes end to end.

If you are setting up for a client

Start with Accounts, sites and organizations to understand how BrightSite separates one client's site from another, then go to Team and Permissions to add people and decide what each of them can do.

The one concept worth learning first

BrightSite keeps two copies of your site: the one you are editing, and the one the public sees. Changes you make are saved as a draft until you publish them. If you understand that, most of the rest of the product makes sense immediately. It is explained in full in Draft, staged and live.

Still stuck? Ask Lumi inside the app, or send us a note and a person will answer.