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

In Squarespace, there is no separate "publish" button for most changes — saving a change makes it live immediately. The exception is blog posts and products, which have a Draft/Published status. If your changes aren't showing, try clearing your browser cache.

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.
There's no preview-then-publish workflow for regular pages (unlike WordPress).
If you're not sure about a change, use the mobile and desktop preview modes before saving.

Blog posts and products have a separate status

Blog posts and products do have a Draft / Published status:

Draft — saved but not visible to visitors
Published — live on your site
Scheduled — will go live automatically at a set date and time

When you create a new blog post, it defaults to Draft. You must explicitly click Publish to make it live.

What to do if changes aren't showing

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

Wait 30 seconds and try refreshing the page. Some changes need a moment to propagate.

Do a hard refresh. On Windows, press Ctrl+Shift+R. On Mac, press Cmd+Shift+R. This forces your browser to reload the page from scratch instead of using a cached version.

Try a different browser or an incognito window. This rules out your own browser's cache as the issue.

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

If you've set a password on a page or on the whole site (in Settings > Security & SSL or similar), changes are visible behind that password. Make sure you're viewing the live site without a password if you're checking your changes as a visitor would see them.

Draft mode (new sites)

Brand new Squarespace sites start in Draft mode. The site isn't visible to the public until you connect a domain and subscribe to a paid plan. Check this in Settings > Domains and your billing status if you're building a new site and it isn't appearing publicly.