Drafts and publishing

Your site can exist in two copies: the live site that visitors see, and a private draft where changes wait until you publish them. Whether the draft exists is one setting for the business, called drafting.

Drafting off

This is how every business starts. There is no draft and no Publish button. Each saved change, from chat, from the edit tools or from an AI agent, rebuilds the live site, usually within two to five minutes.

Drafting on

Changes collect in the draft instead:

The preview on the Site page gets a Live / Draft switch. Draft shows the draft, and rebuilds on every saved change, so you see an edit there a couple of minutes after it is made. You never need to publish to see a change.
The live site stays exactly as it was until someone publishes.
Publish appears in the bar above the preview, on desktop and on a phone, with a menu beside it and a clock icon for version history.

Turning drafting on needs a paid plan. Turning it off needs a clean slate: publish or discard the open draft first. Either way, ask Willo in chat ("let me review changes before they go live", or "publish my changes directly from now on").

The backend has a draft too

While drafting is on, backend changes land on a separate draft copy of your backend: new tables, database writes and backend functions. Rows written there are test data. Publish ships these changes along with the site. A few things have no draft copy and change the live business at once even while drafting: member accounts and their login emails, scheduled jobs, storage buckets and redirects. A content item you publish waits in the draft and goes live with the next Publish. Willo's approval card for any of these says the change is live.

What Publish ships

Publish ships the whole draft at once: every site change and every draft backend change, whoever made it. A draft that holds only database changes can be published too. Publishing takes a few minutes; the button shows that it is running.

The Publish button is greyed out when there is nothing to publish, while the draft preview is still rebuilding, while another deploy is running, or while Willo is still working on the site. Wait for it to finish, then publish.

Before publishing, Review changes, in the menu beside Publish, lists what the draft changes compared with the live site, file by file. Publish a draft walks through it.

Discard

Discard draft, in the same menu, throws away every unpublished change at once. It cannot be undone. It is not a way to roll the live site back: the live site never had those changes.

Version history and going back

Version history, the clock icon beside Publish (in the menu on a phone), lists your last 20 publishes: when, what changed and how many files. It is a record, not a rollback. There is no button that puts the whole site back to an earlier version.

To undo something, undo the change itself: Business → Activity lists every change with an Undo beside it, including changes that were already published. Undoing one makes a new change, which publishes like any other. If a change is too old to undo there, ask Willo to make the change again in reverse. See Undo a change.

Which copy am I looking at?

The preview on the Site page: with drafting on, whichever of Live or Draft you picked; otherwise the live site as of its last build.
Your site's own address: always the live site.

If a change shows in the preview but not on your address, it is waiting to be published. If it shows in neither, see When a site change doesn't show.