Publishing

You can publish changes made to your site and push them to your live domain instantly. Makeswift also allows you to selectively publish individual site resources, such as colors and global components, without publishing content changes to pages.

Makeswift plans limit the number of times you can publish your site in a given month, so you should use your publishes responsibly. Please refer to your plan for full details.

Previewing

Preview links are only accessible to logged-in Makeswift users of the workspace. For read-only access, you can add users with the role of Guest which don’t count against the number of users in your plan. For more information, see the Users page.

Makeswift allows you to share a preview link of your site with others. The preview link will always show the latest changes made in the Visual Builder, even if they have not been published. You can find the Preview button at the top right of the Visual Builder’s browser bar.

We encourage you to use the preview feature to get feedback and review changes before doing a final publish.

How to publish

You can find the Publish button at the top right of the Visual Builder’s browser bar. Only users with Publisher, Admin, and Owner roles will be able to interact with the Publish button.

The publishing workflow begins by selecting which pages and resources you want to publish at this time. Your list of publishable changes are separated into different sections including pages and site resources.

Toggle the checkbox to the left of each item to include it in this publish. You can also toggle the checkbox found in each section’s header to toggle all of it’s items on or off.

Publishing pages

No changes made to pages will take affect on your live site until they are published, including deleting pages or editing their URLs. Pages with recent changes will appear in your publish dialog with a change status found to the right of each page. The different page statuses are the following:

• Updated
• Created
• Deleted
• Taken online
• Taken offline
• Path changed

Publishing offline pages

Edits made to offline pages will not appear in the publish dialog. To publish an offline page, you must first set it to be online. To do so, navigate to the offline page and deselect all elements in the Visual Builder. In the Properties Sidebar, click the Online toggle to turn it green and set the page online. You will now find that page included in the publish dialog.

Publishing site resources

Like pages, edits made to site resources will be displayed as individual, publishable items. Site resources found in the publish dialog include:

• Components
• Colors
• Typographies

When adding a new resource to your site, you must select it in the publish dialog in order for it to be used on your live site. For example, not publishing a newly added site color will cause elements using that color to be displayed as black on live pages.

You can also publish changes made to existing site resources without needing to publish the pages they are found on. Here’s a common situation to apply this workflow: you need to update the navigation global component and publish it immediately, but you have unfinished edits you’ve made to several pages. You can select to only publish the navigation global component which will update the navigation across your live site without publishing your unfinished changes to other pages.

Scheduling publishes

Scheduled publishes are currently only available on certain paid plans. Refer to the Plans page for full details.

In addition to publishing changes immediately, you have the ability to schedule publishes in the future. Here are a couple of important things to understand:

• Scheduled changes won’t show up in the the Changes tab while they are scheduled
• You can cancel a scheduled publish at any time before the scheduled time arrives
• If you cancel a scheduled publish, those changes will reappear in the Changes tab
• You can create multiple scheduled publishes

Although you can have multiple scheduled publishes at a time, we recommend avoiding overlaps in changes across them. This way, you have a clear idea of which changes will be published at which time.

Site history

Site history is currently only available on paid plans. Refer to the Plans page for full details.

Makeswift automatically creates a version of your site every time you publish and stores it for up to 30 days. You can find the previous versions of your site in the History tab of the publish dialog.

Each version will provide information on what was published and when. You can give versions a custom name as well as publish any previous version of your site. Publishing a previous site version will not affect the current draft state of your site in the Visual Builder. It will only point your live site to the selected previous version.

To bring your live site back to the latest version, you can either publish the most recent version in your History tab, or publish new changes to your site in the Changes tab.

Discarding changes

Before you publish, you have the ability to discard changes to pages and resources. This will effectively reset the current state of that specific resource back to the state that was already previously published.

Discarding changes is a permanent action and cannot be undone. For example, If you discard changes to a page or resource that was never previously published, it will be deleted permanently.

You can find the discard change button when hovering on a page or resources listed in the publish dialog.

Best practices

Maintaining a consistent publishing workflow is key to keeping your site in sync. Here are some best practices to follow:

Utilize previews

Previews are a great way to test your changes before publishing them. You can find the preview button at the top right of the Visual Builder’s browser bar.

Every workspace comes with unlimited Guests who can view your site in preview mode.

Publish dialog hygiene

You should strive to keep your publish dialog clean and organized. This will help you avoid accidentally publishing changes you haven’t reviewed or want to publish. To do this, you should:

• Aim to have your publish dialog clean before starting a new session.
• Be aware of what is in the dialog ahead of editing or creating a new page, resource, or component.
• If you’re working on a team, communicate with your team members about what you are working on and what you are publishing.

Publishing in batches

Publishing in batches is a great way to keep track of the state of your site in different points in time. This will also help you leverage the site history feature to revert to a previous state of your site.

To do this, you should:

• Publish your changes in batches that make sense for you team. If you’re working on a new section of your site, publish that section in a single batch.
• Name your batches after publishing them. Makeswift will use the time and date the batch was published to name the version of your site, but you can also give it a custom name in the History tab.
• If you’re working on a team, communicate with your team members about what you’re planning to publish and when.
• Consider your publishing frequency. If you’re making fewer changes, you may want to publish in a single batch less often. If you’re publishing changes frequently, you may want to publish in smaller batches more often and consider a plan with appropriate publishing limits.