Getting your site live
A site you are building is private until you publish it. Publishing is one button, but three other things have to be true before the world can reach what you published. This is all four, and what to do when one is missing.
The short version
- Press Publish on your website overview. Nothing you type is public until you do.
- Your site needs an address: either the free one we give you, or your own domain with its DNS pointing here.
- Your subscription has to be active.
- Your site must not be paused for being over what you pay for.
- If all four are true and it still is not loading, it is almost always DNS, and DNS takes time.
Publishing and saving are different things
Publishing is a one-time switch. It turns your site from something only you can see into something the public can reach. Before you press it there is no live site at all, and your address returns nothing.
Saving is what you do while you work. Edits you make in the editor are held until you save, so you can move between pages freely and change your mind. When you save, everything you changed goes to your site at once.
So on a site you have already published, saving puts those changes live straight away. There is no second step and no separate approval. If you want to work on something without visitors seeing it, do the work in one sitting and save when you are happy with it.
Nothing you save is a dead end. Every page keeps a version history, and you can put an earlier version back at any time.
Your site needs an address
A published site with no address is still not reachable, because there is nowhere to reach it. You have two choices and you can change your mind later.
The free address. Pick a name and your site is at that name under our domain. It works the moment you choose it, because we run that DNS ourselves. This is the fast way to get something live today.
Your own domain. Buy one through us and we point it at your site for you. Or connect one you already own, which means changing a record at whoever you bought it from. Connecting a domain is not finished when you type it into the settings panel. It is finished when we see it actually pointing here.
Why a domain you connected is not working yet
Typing a domain into your settings tells us you intend to use it. It does not move the domain. Until the record at your registrar points here, visitors get your registrar's parking page or an error, and we do not count that domain as an address.
The Address tab shows each domain's status and the exact record to create. After you create it, use Check again. If it still says it is not pointing here, wait. Registrars publish changes on their own schedule and it can take a few hours.
One thing worth knowing: a check tells you what your own internet connection can see right now. A fresh record can look wrong from your office and right from ours, and the reverse, for a while after you make it.
Why a site that was live has stopped
Two reasons, and both say so in the app rather than leaving you to guess.
A payment did not go through. Sites stay up during a grace period while we retry, and you will get email about it. Fix the card and everything comes back exactly as it was. Nothing is deleted while this is happening.
You have more sites than you pay for. If you remove a website from your subscription but keep the site, it gets paused rather than deleted. Everything is still there. Add it back to your subscription and it returns.
Checking it yourself
Open your site in a private or incognito window. That is the closest thing to seeing it the way a stranger does, and it rules out your browser showing you something it kept from earlier.
If the free address works and your own domain does not, the site is fine and the problem is the domain. That is a useful thing to know, because it means you are waiting on DNS rather than on anything you can fix in the editor.