Chykalophia Docs

How saving and publishing work in Squarespace — when changes go live, and what to do if your changes aren't showing up.

One of the most common points of confusion for Squarespace users is understanding exactly when their changes appear on the live site. This guide clears that up.

Quick summary

For ordinary pages, there's no separate publish step: clicking Save puts your changes live. Pages don't have a draft status. They're either enabled (live) or disabled (hidden). Blog posts are different: they stay as drafts until you publish them. If your changes aren't showing, do a hard refresh.

How saving works in Squarespace

When you edit a page in the Squarespace editor and click Save, your changes go live on your website right away. There's no staging step or secondary "Publish" button for regular page edits.

This means:

Visitors to your site can see your changes as soon as you save.
Nothing you change in the editor is public until you save, and Squarespace doesn't save automatically. If your browser closes before you click Save, those changes are lost.
You can undo changes while you're editing. Do it before you save: Squarespace's own guides disagree on whether undo works after saving, and once you click Exit, nothing can be undone.
There's no preview-then-publish workflow for regular pages (unlike WordPress). Page drafts exist only for Squarespace Premium and Enterprise customers.
If you're not sure about a change, check it in the Mobile View as well as on desktop before saving.

A few changes go live the moment you make them, without clicking Save: adding images to gallery sections, and adding, deleting, or rearranging pages in your navigation.

Pages don't have a draft status: they're either enabled or disabled. A new page is live as soon as you add it. To keep a page hidden while you work on it, disable it: in the Pages panel, hover over the page, click the gear icon, switch Enable Page off, and click Save. Switch it back on when you're ready.

Blog posts and products have a separate status

Blog posts have a status:

Draft — saved but not visible to visitors
Needs Review — saved and set aside for someone else to check
Scheduled — will go live automatically at a set date and time
Published — live on your site

When you create a new blog post, it defaults to Draft. To make it live, hover over Publish in the top-left corner and click Publish.

Products work differently. Each product has a Visibility setting: Public, Hidden, or Scheduled.

What to do if changes aren't showing

If you've saved a change but your site still shows the old version:

Refresh the page in your browser.

Do a hard refresh. This forces your browser to reload the page from scratch instead of using a cached version. In Chrome or Firefox on a Mac, press Cmd+Shift+R. On Windows, press Ctrl+F5. In Safari, press Option+Cmd+E, then Cmd+R.

Try a different browser or an incognito window. This rules out your own browser's cache as the issue, and shows you the site the way visitors see it.

Check you actually saved the change — go back into the editor and verify the content looks as you expected.

Why does caching cause this?

Your browser saves (caches) copies of web pages to load them faster next time. Sometimes it shows you the old cached version instead of the updated one. A hard refresh forces the browser to fetch the latest version from Squarespace's servers.

Password-protected pages and site-wide passwords

A page password is set in that page's settings (the gear icon in the Pages panel). A password for the whole site is set in the Site Availability panel, under Settings. Your changes still go live when you save, but visitors have to enter the password to see them. To check what a visitor sees, open the page in a private browser window and enter the password there.

New sites start private

Every new Squarespace site starts out private: only you and your contributors can see it. To show it to the world, the site needs a paid plan. Then open the Site Availability panel, select Public, and click Save. If you're building a new site and it isn't appearing publicly, check both of those.

Common questions

I clicked Save but the page looks the same. Did it work?

Most likely, yes. The usual explanation is that your browser is showing a cached (saved) copy of the page. Do a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5 on Windows, Cmd+Shift+R in Chrome or Firefox on a Mac) to load the latest version.

Can I preview changes before they go live?

Partly. While you're editing, you see your changes on the page before they're public, and you can click the Mobile View icon to check the phone layout. Apart from the few exceptions above, nothing goes live until you click Save, but once you do, it's live. To work on something bigger without visitors seeing it, disable the page or add a page password until it's ready. Moving a page to the Not linked section of the Pages panel takes it out of your menu, but anyone with the direct link can still open it.

Can I undo a published change?

Only before you save, to be safe. While you're editing, click the undo arrow in the top-left corner, or press Ctrl+Z (Windows) or Cmd+Z (Mac). Squarespace's own guides disagree on whether undo still works after you click Save. They agree that saved changes to site styles (fonts, colors, buttons) and saved deletions of blocks and sections can't be undone, and that nothing can be undone after you click Exit. Squarespace doesn't keep a page history, so after that you'd need to change things back by hand. See Undoing changes and recovering deleted pages.

Need a hand?

If you're stuck, email support@chykalophia.com and we'll help. Include your website address and a screenshot if you can.

Publishing your changes