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Preview, Publish, and Deploy
How draft, preview, publish, and deploy relate in Seedly Sites - and why publishing a page never changes the live site until you deploy.
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Seedly Sites separates three ideas that other platforms blur together: previewing a draft, publishing content, and deploying the live site. Getting this model right is the single most important concept in the platform, so here it is up front:
Publish is not Deploy. Publishing saves content in the CMS; only a manual Deploy rebuilds the live website.
If you remember one thing from this page, make it that.
The Three Stages#
| Stage | What it does | Is the live site affected? |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Work in progress. Saved in the CMS, visible in the builder and in draft previews only. | No |
| Publish | Marks the content as the published version in the CMS. This is what the next deploy will build. | No, not yet |
| Deploy | Rebuilds the static site from all published content and ships it to Cloudflare Pages. | Yes |
A page can be published in the CMS for days without appearing on the live site. That is by design: you publish each piece of content as it becomes ready, then deploy once to take the whole batch live.
Drafts#
Every page and blog post starts as a draft. Drafts:
- Are visible in the portal and editable in the builder
- Never appear on the live site or in the static build
- Never appear in the sitemap
Ported pages from a site migration also always land as drafts, so nothing goes live before you review it.
Previewing a Draft#
You have three ways to see a draft before it goes anywhere:
- The builder canvas - the builder renders your changes as you make them, styled exactly as the live site will style them.
- The draft preview link - open a shareable preview of the draft version of a page or post. Send it to your client for sign-off; they see the draft without logging in to anything.
- The Preview button - the sidebar Preview button opens the current live site in a new tab, which is useful for comparing the live version against what you are about to change.
Publishing#
When a page or post is ready:
- Open it in the portal or the builder
- Switch its status from Draft to Published
- Save
The content is now the official published version in the CMS. The live site has not changed. The published version is what the next deploy will pick up.
Scheduled Publishing#
Pages and blog posts support a scheduled publish date. When the time arrives, the platform flips the content from draft to published automatically.
Scheduled publishing does not deploy either. A post that auto-publishes overnight still needs a deploy before visitors can see it. If you schedule content, plan the deploy that follows it.
Deploying#
Deploying is always a deliberate, manual action: the Deploy button in the site's portal sidebar. There is no automatic deploy on publish, on save, or on a schedule. This is intentional:
- You control exactly when the live site changes
- You can batch many edits, across many pages, into one go-live moment
- A half-finished editing session can never leak onto a client's production site
The full deploy flow, statuses, and troubleshooting live on the Deploying a site page.
The Rule, One More Time#
Any change that should appear on the live site needs two things:
- The content must be published in the CMS
- Someone must press Deploy
This applies to everything: pages, blog posts, site settings, colors and fonts, the header and footer, redirects, tracking scripts, and data edits of any kind. If you changed it and the live site does not show it, the answer is almost always "it has not been deployed yet."
Summary#
| Action | Live site updated? |
|---|---|
| Save a draft | No |
| Preview a draft | No |
| Publish a page | No |
| Scheduled publish fires | No |
| Change site settings | No |
| Press Deploy | Yes |