Publishing and Discarding Drafts

Changes you make in Site Edit are saved to a site-editing draft. They do not appear on the live website until you publish that draft. This article explains what the draft holds, how to review it, and how to publish or discard pending changes.

How the draft works

The draft is a single holding area for the whole site, not one draft per page. Every edit you make in Site Edit lands in it, whichever surface you used:

  • Page and post Settings — title, slug, status, SEO, access options
  • Design — site-wide colors, typography, and other shared styles
  • On-page edits in the preview — text you type by hand, AI edits, and palette changes
  • Modules — modules you add, reorder, or edit
  • Widgets — sidebar position and the widgets on a page

Because everything collects in one place, you can work across several pages in one session, keep refining, and then release all of it together.

Open Site Edit

From My Sites, find the site you want to update and select SITE EDIT.

The SITE EDIT button on a site card

Make an edit

Edit anything that creates a draft change — for example page settings, design colors, widgets, or on-page module content. When unpublished changes exist, the draft bar appears with a change summary, DISCARD, and PUBLISH.

The Site Edit draft bar with Discard and Publish
  1. Change summary: Shows how many edits are waiting in the draft.
  2. DISCARD: Remove all unpublished changes in the current Site Edit draft.
  3. PUBLISH: Apply all changes in the draft to the live website.

The draft bar is your signal that the live site and the preview no longer match. If the bar is not there, everything you can see in the preview is already published.

Review before you publish

PUBLISH and DISCARD both act on the entire draft, so it is worth a quick look before you use either one:

  1. Check the change summary count against what you expect to have changed. A higher number than you remember usually means edits from earlier in the session — or a shared change such as a site-wide color — are still waiting.
  2. Use Pages to open the other pages you touched and confirm the preview looks right. Site-wide design edits show up on every page, so check more than the one you were working on.
  3. Confirm each page's Status on Settings → General is what you want. Publishing the draft does not change a page from Draft to Published.

Publish

  1. Review the change summary so you know what will go live.
  2. Select PUBLISH.
  3. Wait for publishing to finish. The draft bar clears when there are no remaining unpublished edits.

Important: PUBLISH applies every pending Site Edit change in the draft — not only the last thing you edited. It is separate from a page's own Status setting (Published / Draft / Private).

If you have an unfinished experiment sitting in the draft alongside work you do want live, finish or revert that experiment first — there is no way to publish part of a draft and leave the rest pending.

Discard

  1. Select DISCARD if you want to throw away unpublished draft edits.
  2. Confirm if prompted.
  3. Verify the draft bar is gone and the preview reflects the last published state.

Discarding cannot be undone. Published live-site content is not removed by discarding a draft.

Discard is the right choice when you have been trying things out and want to get back to the published site exactly as visitors see it. It is the wrong choice when only some of the pending edits were mistakes — in that case, fix those edits individually and leave the rest of the draft alone.

Page Status vs Publish

Control What it does
PUBLISH (draft bar) Applies pending Site Edit draft changes to the live site
Status (page Settings → General) Sets that page to Published, Draft, or Private

Use both intentionally: a page can be Published while you still have unpublished Site Edit draft edits waiting in the draft bar.

They are also useful in combination. To build a page without showing it to visitors yet, set its Status to Draft, then publish the Site Edit draft freely — the page itself stays hidden until you set it to Published and publish again.

Need more help?

For questions, concerns, or feedback, chat with our team at app.placester.com/chat.

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