Publishing your site

Going live, and coming back off again.

1. Open Publish. Under Before you publish is a list of what is still empty — a missing venue, a schedule with nothing in it, a section you opened and never wrote.
2. Work down it. Each unfinished line carries an Add link that takes you to the screen that fixes it, and says why it matters.
3. Press Publish. Only one of those lines can actually stop you; the rest are things guests will notice are absent, and you can go live without them.
4. Check it with View your site — the same page a guest gets, at your own address.
5. Keep editing afterwards. Changes go live as you save them; there is nothing to press again.
6. Unpublish puts it back to invisible without deleting a word. Links already given out stop working until you publish again, so it is worth telling anyone who has one.

What the screen checks

Publish is its own screen, and it tells you what is still empty before you commit — a missing venue, a schedule with nothing in it, a section you opened and never wrote.

Until you press it, your site is invisible. A stranger who somehow knew your address sees nothing at all: not your names, not your date, not your venue. Your planner and your partner still see it in full, so you can build the whole thing together first.

What is public once you publish

The pages you have written become readable by anyone with the address. That is the point of a wedding website.

Your guest list, replies, dietary requirements, seating plan, budget and inbox are never part of that. They stay behind your login whether you publish or not, and no address will reach them.

A published wedding site is deliberately kept out of search engines. It names you and says where you will be on a particular day, and that is for your guests rather than for the internet.

Changing your mind

You can keep editing after you publish, and changes go live as you save them. You can also unpublish, which puts the site back to invisible without deleting anything you have written.