Everything you do in the FastSites editor is a draft until you publish — you can leave a page half-finished, come back a week later, and nothing has gone live in the meantime. Publishing is the deliberate step that pushes your current draft out to your real domain.
Before you publish
- Check every page, not just the home page. It's easy to polish the page you landed on and forget the others still have placeholder text.
- Preview on mobile. Use the device switcher — most visitors to a small-business site arrive on a phone.
- Check your contact details. A wrong phone number or address is the single most common thing customers notice.
- Look at your menu. Make sure every page you want visible actually has a link to it.
What publishing does
Publishing takes your current draft and makes it the live version of your site at your domain. If you haven't connected a custom domain yet, your site is still reachable at your FastSites subdomain in the meantime — you don't need to wait on domain setup to go live.
After you publish
You can keep editing. Every further change is a new draft on top of the published version, so your live site stays exactly as it was until you choose to publish again. There's no risk of a half-made edit accidentally going live.
If something looks wrong
Open Site Settings and check the page or section in question directly in the editor — most "it looks wrong" issues turn out to be a section that still has its original placeholder image or text. If you're stuck, the tutorials in Website Editor below cover the individual editing tools in more depth.