Publish, preview and unpublish

Your site is live from the start. Here is how to take it offline while you work, preview it privately, and control search-engine indexing.

A new site is published immediately. Nothing else is required: there is no build or deploy step and every save is live at once.

Unpublish while you set things up

  1. Open Website → Settings.
  2. Under Preferences, switch Published off and save.

Visitors now get a “not found” page. Search engines that already indexed you will drop the pages over time.

Preview an unpublished site

You can still see your own site while it is unpublished:

  • Use the Preview site button at the bottom of the sidebar, or the preview link on the dashboard and in Settings.
  • The preview opens your real site with a fixed “Unpublished” banner and a Publish link. It is private to you: the preview link signs you in on the site for 12 hours and pages carry noindex and are never cached.

When the site is published, the same button becomes View public site.

Publish again

Switch Published back on in Settings. Everything you saved while offline appears immediately.

Control search-engine indexing

Settings → Preferences → Search engine indexing decides whether Google and others may index your site. With indexing off, every page carries a noindex tag, robots.txt disallows crawlers and no structured data is emitted. Your site is still reachable by anyone with the link.

Use this when your site is public but you do not want it in search results yet.

Blog posts have their own switches

Posts can be drafts, scheduled or published, and any unpublished post has a private preview link. See Blog.