Drafts and Publishing

How drafts work

Website Pages saves your work as a draft. Use Save Draft to save manually, and drafts are auto‑saved while you edit.

Saving finishes in-progress text from Text, Dynamic Text, Accordion, List, and Badge widgets before the draft is stored, so you can save immediately after typing without first clicking away.

Preview before publishing

• Preview Page opens a preview of the current draft.
• Published preview actions open a fresh published preview when you need to verify the live version immediately after publishing.
• Internal links clicked inside the preview stay in the same draft or published preview context, which helps you test navigation without leaving the builder.
• Use preview to check layout, links, and mobile spacing before you publish.

Publish a page

Use Publish page only from the Publish menu when your page is ready but shared header or footer edits are not. The page goes live while those shared edits remain in draft for later review and publication. Preview both the page and the shared layout before publishing the latter across your website.

When you publish a page together with shared header or footer changes, they are saved as one publication. If your shared header or footer edits conflict with a newer live version, publishing pauses and asks you to reload and review before trying again. Header or footer drafts that you did not publish remain available for later review.

If publishing cannot complete, Hiveality keeps the failure visible and returns you to the editor instead of presenting the page as successfully published. Resolve the reported issue, then publish again.

Publishing an existing saved draft now recognizes both current draft shapes, including drafts stored directly as an editable page tree. When the editor has only empty header or footer placeholders, publishing the page keeps the current shared header and footer instead of treating those placeholders as a requested replacement.

When a connected assistant prepares a focused page edit, it can start from the published page instead of an older saved draft. Hiveality keeps a Page History copy of that draft before replacing it. If a draft has added or removed widgets since the live version, an assisted publish pauses and asks for those other changes to be reviewed before they go live. Review the page preview and the reported changes before approving a publish that includes existing draft work.

Unpublish or discard drafts

• Unpublish removes a page from the live site and clears the public cached version, including funnel-step paths when the page is part of a funnel.
• In Manage Pages, use a page menu's Activate or Inactivate action when you only need to change whether a page is live.
• Inactivating a page also turns off sitemap, robots, and LLMS discovery inclusion for that page. Activating it turns those discovery controls back on.
• The homepage must stay active. Set another page as the homepage before making the current homepage inactive.
• Discard Draft reverts to the last published version.
• In Manage Pages, inactive pages are dimmed with a hidden-page icon and sorted below active pages inside the same folder.

Verify after publishing

• Check key pages (Home, Contact, Booking)
• Fresh published previews are built from the newly published page version, so use them when you need to confirm visitors will see the latest copy, widgets, and page settings.
• Publishing also refreshes the public page path, so using Publish Page again can help when a live page appears stale after recent edits.
• Dashboard publishes and approved Website API Key page publishes use the same public refresh path, so repeated publishes can act as a reliable refresh signal for stale public views.
• Publishing and content refreshes also support unusually long page paths more reliably, reducing cases where a live page keeps older content after an update.
• If you publish header, footer, menu, or popup changes, spot-check more than one page because shared layout and display changes appear across the public site.
• Test on mobile
• Use a private window to avoid cached content
• Recheck SEO output with Page SEO Health and mobile layout with Responsive Design.