You can access your site via the editor and preview, but to make your site live so it is available online for visitors and search engines, it must be published.
To make your site visible online and to search engines, you must publish your site. To publish your site, in the top navigation bar, click Publish.
After a site is published, any changes that you make to it, with the exception of store and blog updates, will only be visible online after you click the same button to Republish. Changes you make in store and blog post content are live right away.
What happens when a site is published
- When you click Publish, an XML sitemap is created for your site and is auto-submitted to search engines such as Google and Bing, with the limitation of one submission per day. A sitemap lists all the URLs for your site, including eCommerce category pages and product URLs. To access your site sitemap, open your published URL and add
sitemap.xmlto the end of it. For example,http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. To keep your site private, add No index to your site pages. For more information, see Pages and Popups. - Every time you click Publish, our system creates a backup of your site. The system can only hold up to 20 automated backups per site, so if you want to make sure an existing site backup isn’t overridden by a newer automated backup, create a manual backup of the site. You can make up to 10 manual backups per sites. For more information, see Backup Sites.