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 clip above is a deployed client site - the hero, service list, and reviews are all real content managed in the CMS and shipped as static pages.
| 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.
Every page and blog post starts as a draft. Drafts:
Ported pages from a site migration also always land as drafts, so nothing goes live before you review it.
You have three ways to see a draft before it goes anywhere:
A draft preview resolves the same dynamic content the live site does, so what your client signs off on is what publishes. Links to your home page, merge tokens, and your own thank-you page settings all behave as they will in production rather than as placeholders.
When a page or post is ready:
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.
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 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:
The full deploy flow, statuses, and troubleshooting live on the Deploying a site page.
Any change that should appear on the live site needs two things:
This applies to almost everything: pages, blog posts, site settings, colors and fonts, the header and footer, redirects, tracking scripts, and data edits of any kind. The one exception is a Connected Reviews widget, which refreshes on its own once its page has been deployed. If you changed it and the live site does not show it, the answer is almost always "it has not been deployed yet."
| 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 |