Preview, Publish and Unpublish Your Square Online Site
Managing whether your site is live or not, and previewing any edits to your site before publishing, can all be done from both the site editor and your Dashboard. Here, we’ll review the mechanics of each below.
Learn more about how to Navigate the Square Online site editor and how to navigate the Square Online Overview page in Dashboard.
Preview Your Website
You can preview any changes you’ve made to your Square Online site before you make them go live. To do so, select the Preview button in the Square Dashboard.
In the preview mode, you can copy and share a preview link by selecting Share > Copy share link. This link is for viewing a preview of your live site only, and doesn’t make your site go live like publishing does. Only the person you share the preview link with can see what a published version of your website would look like.
Publish Your Website
When you publish a website, you’re making the edited version of the site go live for people browsing the internet to see. The easiest way to publish your website is to access the Square Dashboard and select the Publish button. When your Square Online site is finished publishing, you’ll see a confirmation pop-up window appear with a link to your live site.
Note: The newly published version of your site is not locked in until you (or any visitor of your site) opens it up in a browser at least once. This is simply due to how our publishing mechanism works. If no one looks at the newly published site and you continue editing it after publishing, then each edit will appear live without you selecting Publish again. To avoid this behaviour, select the link that appears in the pop-up window every time you publish.
Unpublish Your Website
To unpublish your Square Online site:
From your Square Online Overview page, go to Website > Site Preferences.
Select Unpublish.
When you’re ready, you can always republish the site from the editor.