Publishing & preview
Preview a page before it goes live, publish your whole site or individual pages, and understand the difference between a saved draft and a published page.
Editing a page and publishing it are two separate steps. As you work, your changes are saved as a draft that only your team can see. Nothing reaches the public until you publish — first the website as a whole, then, if you like, each individual page. This article walks you through previewing a page, publishing the site, showing or hiding individual pages, and reading the status badges so you always know what the public can actually see.
Who can do this. Publishing needs a site role that grants publish — typically the Site Manager (organisation owners and admins can do it too). The Editor role can create and edit pages but cannot publish or unpublish; the Publish controls simply won't appear for an Editor. If you can edit a page but see no Publish button, that's your role — see Members & roles.
Where to find it. Your website → the Website overview page. The site-level publish card sits near the top; each page has its own card in the Pages grid below.
Draft versus published
It helps to keep two ideas separate:
- Saving a draft. Every time you edit a page and save, your work is stored. This is true whether or not the page is published — editing never changes what the public sees. You can safely keep refining a page over several sessions; it stays a private draft until you choose to publish.
- Publishing. Publishing flips a page (or the whole site) from private to public. Only then can a visitor reach it.
Because of this split, a page can be fully written and saved but still hidden from the public — that's completely normal, and it's how you prepare pages before launch.
Previewing a page
Each page in the Pages grid shows a small live preview — a scaled-down picture of the real public page, exactly as a visitor would see it.
The preview shows the live public page, so it only appears once your website is published. Before you publish the site, each card shows a No preview yet placeholder instead. This is expected: there is no public page to picture until the site is live.
To see a page at full size, publish the site (below), then open it through its public URL. The preview thumbnails are deliberately read-only — clicking one does nothing; use the Edit button on the card to make changes.
Publishing your website
Publishing the whole site is what takes your organisation's website online for the first time. Until you do this, nothing is public.
Who can do this. The Site Manager (or an organisation owner/admin). The publish card is hidden for Editors.
Open the Website overview
Go to Your website. At the top you'll see a Status badge — Draft before launch, Published once the site is live — and the site's public URL.
Check the Publishing card
Just below the status, the Publishing card explains the current state ("Your website is a draft and not visible to the public") and holds the Publish button.
If the home page isn't complete enough to go live, the button is disabled and a message appears: Fill in all content fields (English + Arabic) and a valid contact email before publishing. The home page is the one page every live site must have, so its hero title, subtitle, and call-to-action button label must be filled in both English and Arabic first.
Press Publish
Once the home page is complete, the button becomes active. Press Publish. You'll see a Publication updated confirmation, the status badge changes to Published, and the page previews begin to appear on each card.
Publishing the site also publishes your home page automatically — the home page can't be hidden on its own, because a live site must always have one. The other pages stay hidden until you publish each of them (see below).
Taking the site offline
If you ever need to take the whole website down — for a rebuild, or because something went out by mistake — open the same Publishing card and press Unpublish. The status returns to Draft and every public page (including pages you'd individually published) becomes unreachable at once. Your content is untouched; you can publish again whenever you're ready.
Showing or hiding individual pages
Once the site is live, you decide which of the other pages — About, Contact, Programmes, Projects, Sponsorship, News, Governance, Library — appear on it. A page is publicly visible only when both the site and that page are published.
Each page card carries its own visibility badge and button:
- Visible (green) — the page is published and reachable by the public.
- Hidden (blue) — the page is a draft; visitors can't reach it.
Find the page card
In the Pages grid, locate the page you want to show. Its badge tells you whether it's currently Visible or Hidden.
Press Publish (or Unpublish)
On a Hidden page, press Publish to make it public. On a Visible page, press Unpublish to hide it again. You'll get a Page visibility updated confirmation and the badge flips.
As with the site, the Publish button is disabled until that page's required content is filled in (in both English and Arabic). Finish editing the page first, then return here to publish it.
Remember the two-part rule: a page is only live when the site is published and the page is published. If a page reads Visible but you can't reach it publicly, check that the whole site is still published — unpublishing the site hides everything regardless of each page's own badge.
Nothing you publish is destructive
Publishing and unpublishing only change who can see a page — they never change or delete your content. You can move a page between Hidden and Visible as often as you need, and your edits, images, and text remain exactly as you left them.