To allow visitors to access your website, you need to publish it. Saving your site is not the same as publishing it.
While Sitebuilder automatically saves your progress every 2 minutes, your visitors cannot see the changes until you publish your website. Read this article to understand the difference between saving and publishing.
When you are done making changes to your site, click the Publish button in the top-right corner of the Sitebuilder:
Alternatively, go to the main menu in the top-left corner of the Sitebuilder and choose the option Publish from the dropdown menu.
Publishing to a free subdomain
Note: Your free subdomain name is auto-generated based on the website name which you can set in the Website > Settings menu.
For example, if the site name is My perfect site, the auto-generation mechanism would pick the most suitable subdomain, eg. ”my-perfect-site” or ”my-perfect-site-2” if ”my-perfect-site” is already used by some other site.
It’s good practice to set a meaningful website name before publishing your website for the first time.
Note: You cannot change the auto-generated subdomain name. Make sure to set your website name the way you want it to appear in the subdomain URL before publishing your site for the first time. You can do this in the main menu:
In the vertical menu, choose Settings, then General.
Enter your website name and click Submit and Publish.
Publishing to a custom domain
You also have an option to publish to a custom domain. You can purchase your custom domain with a variety of top-level domains and popular country-code extensions. You can also choose how long to register your domain (one, two, or five years).
Note: You get a free custom domain when you purchase one of the annual hosting packages: Yola Bronze, Yola Silver, or Yola Gold. This offer includes free domain privacy for one year as well as two months of hosting for free. This feature is only available if you go through our Yola Package page.
What happens after your site has been published
After publishing your site you can easily make changes at any time, so there is no need to wait until your site is "finished" before you publish it.
Remember that a good website is always "under construction" and you should continue to update your site as often as possible after you publish it.
Making your website accessible for visitors
Once you have published your site, your visitors will be able to view it by clicking on a link that you provide, or by typing your URL (website address) into the address bar of their browsers.
Please note that you may not be able to immediately find your site in search results as it takes time for newly published sites to be indexed by search engines. Take a peek at our collection of SEO tutorials for more information on how to help your site appear in search results more quickly.
Your website online status
When you start working on your site in the Sitebuilder, your website is private by default. This means that only the site owner and people who help to create a website can see it. Your site is hidden from search engines at this point.
When editing your site, your changes won't be publicly visible until you save your changes and publish your site.
Keeping website private
When you work on your website, you may want to keep it private until you are ready to go live. To keep your website hidden from visitors you may wish to keep saving it without publishing.
Note: Yola Sitebuilder automatically saves your website while in progress every 2 minutes.
When you publish
After you press Publish, your site goes live and can be viewed online. It is accessible by:
- Pressing the View your published site link.
- Entering the URL of your domain name in the browser
Note: if you cannot see changes you have made to your published site, you may want to clear the cache and try again.