Putting a page live

Three buttons in the editor's top bar do three different things. Confusing them is the most common early mistake.

Button	What it does	What shoppers see
Save	Records the draft	No change
Preview	Opens the saved page on the real storefront	No change
Publish	Puts it online	The new version

Save

Records the draft. The editor reports "Changes saved". Nothing leaves the building.

Occasionally you get "This page can't be saved as it is" with a reason — that is the global-section band rule, and all three reasons name the fix. See Global sections.

Preview

Preview opens the saved version of the page at the real storefront address — without publishing.

This matters more than it looks: the preview runs on the storefront, not on the canvas, so it shows you things the canvas cannot — a working cart, filters that actually navigate, custom code that actually runs, fonts loading the way they will live.

Remember it shows the saved version. Edits you have not saved are not in it.

If you see "Couldn't open the preview", that is a server-side failure; your draft is untouched.

Publish

Press Publish and the page goes online.

Publishing updates the whole site, not only the page you have open. The dialog says exactly that: "Publishing updates all {n} pages on this site, not only this one."

This is deliberate, and the reason is global sections: a header edited once must not be fresh on this page and stale on the rest. If publishing touched one page, every other page would carry an old header until you remembered to republish each of them.

The price: any half-finished drafts saved on other pages go live too. If you are mid-way through another page and not ready to show it, check before pressing.

Afterwards, the dialog hands you the public link, with Copy link and Open page.

After publishing

The site thumbnail on the dashboard is captured from the homepage. If the capture fails you are told why, and the previous thumbnail is kept:

Message	Means
"The site has no public address yet — publish it to a domain first."	Nothing to capture
"Today's screenshot limit is used up."	Daily allowance spent
"The screenshot service did not respond."	Temporary failure

None of these breaks the publish — it is the small picture on the site card.

Template pages go live differently

An ordinary page has one address. A template page — Product, Category, Post, Search, Checkout — renders a whole family of addresses. Publishing a template updates how every product or every article looks, at once.

See Pages and the canvas.

If you need to go back

Every publish saves a version. See Rolling back a page — and remember that restoring only replaces your draft; the live site is unchanged until you publish again.

Taking the store offline

The site's Settings carry a maintenance mode. Switch it on and visitors see a maintenance page, and the site card on the dashboard shows a Maintenance badge.

The maintenance page is a template page of type Maintenance — you build it yourself, like any other.