My changes aren't showing up

You made a change, saved it, and the live site still shows the old version. This is the most common thing people report, and it is almost always one of four causes. Work down the list. They are ordered by how often each turns out to be the answer.

You haven't published yet

This is the cause the overwhelming majority of the time.

Saving and publishing are separate steps in BrightSite, on purpose. Saving stores your work as a draft so you can leave a half-finished page without visitors seeing it. Publishing puts it on the live site. Until you publish, the public keeps seeing the last published version.

Fix: open the page and publish it. Look for an indication that the page has unpublished changes, a draft state, or a note that changes are not yet live.

If publishing is not available to you, that is a permissions matter, not a bug. Members and admins can publish; viewers and some custom roles cannot. Ask someone with publish permission to release it.

One thing that catches people out: changing a layout, a component, or a global setting affects many pages, and those changes have to be published too. Publishing one page does not release a change you made to the layout behind it.

Your browser is showing you a cached copy

Browsers keep local copies of pages to load them faster. Yours may be showing you a saved copy from before your change.

Fix: do a hard refresh, which forces the browser to fetch the page again.

• Windows and Linux: Ctrl + Shift + R
• Mac: Cmd + Shift + R

If that does not do it, open the page in a private or incognito window. A private window has no cache, so what you see there is what a first-time visitor sees. This is the quickest way to tell a caching problem apart from a real one.

Your visitors are not stuck with the old version. Caches clear on their own.

You're editing a staging site, not the live one

Staging sites are editable copies of your site for working on changes safely. If you are in one, your edits apply to the copy, not to the live site, which is exactly what staging is for.

It is easy to be in a staging site without noticing, particularly if you left one open in a tab yesterday.

Fix: check which site you have open. If it is a staging site, either promote it to live when the changes are ready, or make the change again on the live site.

You're looking at the wrong domain

Sites can be reachable at more than one address, such as a custom domain and the BrightSite address, or several domains where one is primary.

Fix: confirm the address in your browser is the one you expect. If you have several domains, check which is set as primary. Try the other address and see whether your change is there.

A related version of this: someone else has the site open on their machine, and their old-looking page is their cache, not your site.

Still not showing

If you have been through all four:

1. Open the page in a private window on a different device. A phone on mobile data works well, since it shares nothing with your computer.
2. Note exactly what you changed, on which page, and what you see instead.
3. Check the page's version history to confirm your change was saved.
4. Contact support with the page URL and those details.