Publishing overview

Publish your site changes to see them live on the web — instantly!

Whether you’re in your site, the Legacy Editor, or Site settings, you can publish your site to push changes to the web instantly, without the hassle of file and server management or version overrides. Webflow provides additional controls to make publishing seamless and straightforward — you can publish to a dedicated staging environment preview your work before making it live, publish (and unpublish) Collection items individually and separately from the rest of your site so you don’t affect any design works-in-progress, and set appropriate publishing roles and permissions for your team members to control who can and cannot publish your site or CMS items.  

How to publish your site

You can publish site changes and updates from Site actions, Legacy Editor, or Site settings.

Who can publish CMS items to production?

• Enterprise and partners only — all roles except “reviewers,” “designer (needs approval),” and custom roles without the “publish CMS items to production” permission
• Other plans — all roles except “reviewers”

Who can publish the site to staging or production?

• Enterprise and partners only — the default “site manager” and “designer” roles, as well as custom roles with site publishing permissions — which can be set to just staging or staging and production.
• Other plans — the default “site manager” and team members who have Can publish turned on

Publishing from Site actions or Site settings

By default, your site comes with a subdomain (e.g., yoursite.webflow.io) that you can use as a development or staging environment. For sites with Site plans, you can also add a custom domain (e.g., yourdomain.com) to use as a production or live environment – this means that your site is visible and public on the web. The publish modal menu in Site actions and Site settings lets you publish to both of these domains (i.e., the subdomain and the custom domain), so be sure to carefully select your desired publish destination. 

To publish from Site actions in your site or from Site settings: 

1. Click Publish
2. Check the domain(s) you want to publish to
3. Click Publish to selected domains

Publishing from the Legacy Editor

The Legacy Editor toolbar indicates the total number of unpublished changes that are staged to be published. These staged changes include work by all teammates, not just the teammate who clicks Publish. Publishing changes made in the Legacy Editor also publishes any changes made in your site, so make sure you’re aware of all changes before publishing.

To publish your entire site from the Legacy Editor:

1. Click Publish to preview a summary of your changes
2. Click Publish changes to publish all changes and updates

How to save and publish individual Collection items

When you create a new Collection item or edit an existing Collection item, you can choose from various saving and publishing options. Learn more about saving and publishing Collection items.

How to unpublish your site

You can unpublish your site from any or all of your domains from Site actions in your site or from Site settings. Unpublishing works immediately and you can always republish your site by selecting the domain(s) and publishing again.

To quickly unpublish your site from all domains and subdomains, click the Unpublish icon in your Site settings.

To unpublish your site from a single domain:

1. Open your site or go to Site settings
2. Click Publish 
3. Click Unpublish next to the domain you want to unpublish your site from

How to use the Webflow staging subdomain for testing and feedback

To test custom code or get feedback and approval on your site design, you can publish your site to the Webflow staging subdomain (e.g., yoursite.webflow.io) – without also pushing those changes out to your custom domain. 

To publish to the staging subdomain without publishing to your custom domain: 

1. Open your site or go to Site settings
2. Click Publish 
3. Check the Webflow staging subdomain (e.g., yoursite.webflow.io)
4. Uncheck your custom domain
5. Click Publish to select domains

You can edit your subdomain in the webflow.io domain field under Site settings > Publishing tab > Staging.

Advanced publishing options

Advanced publishing options are located in Site settings > Publishing tab > Advanced publishing options. These allow you to minify HTML, CSS, and/or JS and choose to use secure frame headers to restrict where your site can be embedded.