Publishing and Site Management

Nothing you edit goes live until you publish it. This section explains how BrightSite keeps your work-in-progress separate from what visitors see, how to put changes live when you are ready, and how to take a copy of the whole site.

Read this one first

Every page, post and design has two states: what is saved as you work, and what is published to the public site. You can edit for as long as you like without affecting your visitors. When you publish, the saved version replaces the live one.

Draft, staged and live is the single most important page in this help center. It defines the terms used everywhere else. If you read nothing else, read that.

Everything in this section

• Draft, staged and live: the three states your content moves through, and why an edit does not change the public site on its own.
• Publishing changes: publishing one page or everything at once, what to check first, and what happens immediately after.
• Version history: reading the list of earlier versions and restoring the site to one of them when a change did not work out.
• Staging sites: a full copy of your site you can rebuild or redesign, then promote so it becomes the live one. How many you can have depends on your plan.
• Import and export: take a copy of your whole site as a file, for backups or to move it between organizations.

If a change is not showing

Nine times out of ten it was saved but not published. See My changes aren't showing up.