Preview, save drafts, and publish your website

> Building your own personal site rather than the community's? See > [Publish your site](publish-your-site) in the My Website guides — personal sites > publish differently, and the steps below don't apply to them.

The website editor shows a live preview of your site as you build it. Everything you see in that preview is exactly what a visitor sees — so it's worth knowing how it behaves before you publish.

Preview at different screen sizes#

Use the device buttons at the top of the editor to switch the preview between desktop, tablet, and phone widths. This lets you check that your layout looks right on every screen a visitor might use — not just your own.

The preview is a true-to-life window into your site. What you see at a given width is what a real visitor at that width gets.

Save a draft#

Your changes are saved as a draft — a private working copy only you can see. You can leave and come back; your draft is waiting. Nothing you do in the editor reaches the public until you publish.

Publish your site#

When you're happy with the draft, hit Publish. Your live site updates within a few minutes. You can keep editing afterward — new changes stay in the draft until you publish again, so the live site never changes underneath your visitors mid-edit.

The Publish button tells you whether the page you're on has anything waiting to go live. The moment you make an edit, it turns red — with a small dot — to signal you have unpublished changes. Once your edits are live and nothing has changed since, it settles into a greyed-out Published with a checkmark, so you always know at a glance whether the page in front of you matches what visitors see. (It tracks the current page — if you've edited several pages, step through them and publish each one that still shows red.)

Troubleshooting#

The heading text gets bigger as I make the preview wider#

This is expected, not a glitch. Big headings are designed to scale with the screen width so they stay proportionate everywhere — small and tidy on a phone, large and bold on a wide desktop. As you widen the preview, the heading grows to match, up to a built-in maximum, then stops.

Because the preview mirrors a real browser, this is genuinely how the headline will look to a visitor at that width. To see the size at a specific screen, click the phone, tablet, or desktop button rather than dragging the preview by hand.

My changes aren't showing on the live site#

Make sure you clicked Publish — saving only updates your private draft. After publishing, give it a few minutes; the live site is briefly cached and refreshes shortly after.