Navigation & Publishing

Building pages is only half of your hosted website. This page covers everything that happens around your pages — taking the site live, sharing drafts for review, organizing your menus, setting up redirects, rolling back changes, and tracking each page's editorial status.

These tools live in the Website section of your dashboard (Commerce plan and up). If you're new to the hosted website, start with the Website Overview and Pages.

Note: The hosted website is a paid feature. Free-plan companies don't get the Site Builder. See Subscriptions & Plans for what each tier includes.

Drafts vs. published

Every page has two independent states:

• Draft / Published — controls whether the page is live on your public website.
• Editorial status (Draft / In review / Approved) — an internal label for your team's workflow. This is separate from the live state — a page can be marked Approved while still unpublished, or In review while already live.

When you create a page, it starts as an unpublished draft. Nobody can see it on your public site until you publish it. You edit freely, autosave keeps your work safe, and the page stays invisible to the world the whole time.

What the first publish turns on

Publishing your first page does two things at once:

1. It makes that page live at embed.timbercloud.com/site/your-slug/your-path (or your connected custom domain).
2. It switches your company over to the new hosted website — the site itself goes live.

In other words, the first publish is the moment your website is "turned on." After that, publishing or unpublishing individual pages just toggles whether each specific page is visible.

Publishing a page

1. Open the page in the editor.
2. Click Publish in the editor topbar.

The page goes live within a moment. The topbar pill switches from Draft to Published, and the page is reachable at its public URL.

To take a page back offline, open it and click Unpublish. The page reverts to a draft — your content is untouched, it's just no longer visible to visitors. The home page (always at /) is the front door of your site, so think twice before unpublishing it.

Tip: Want to change a published page without visitors seeing half-finished edits? Edits autosave to the draft copy as you work. Use a preview link to review, then re-publish to push the changes live.

Preview an unpublished draft

You don't have to publish a page to show it to a teammate or client. From the editor you can generate a preview link — a private, tokenized URL that renders the current draft exactly as it would look live.

• Open the page and use the Preview action in the topbar to copy a shareable link.
• Anyone with the link can view the draft in a browser — no login required.
• Preview links are time-limited (they expire after about 7 days), so they're safe to send for sign-off without exposing the draft permanently.

This is the cleanest way to get approval before going live, or to share a work-in-progress page that isn't ready for the public yet.

Scheduled publishing

If you want a page to go live at a specific time — a seasonal landing page, a product launch, an announcement — schedule it instead of remembering to click Publish yourself.

1. Open the page in the editor.
2. From the topbar ⋯ (more) menu, choose Schedule publish.
3. Pick a future date and time (it must be at least a minute out), then click Schedule.

The page stays a draft until that moment, then flips live automatically — typically within a minute of the scheduled time. A Scheduled badge appears on the page while it's queued.

To change your mind, reopen the dialog and click Clear schedule (or pick a new time). Scheduling only applies to pages that aren't already published; to reschedule a live page, unpublish it first.

Navigation editor

The Navigation editor controls which pages appear in your site's Navbar (top menu) and Footer, and in what order. It's a drag-and-drop board, so you arrange your menus visually instead of editing settings page by page.

Open it at Website → Navigation.

The board has two regions — Navbar and Footer — each showing an ordered list of the pages currently placed there, plus an Unplaced tray of pages that aren't shown in that region.

• Add a page to a menu — drag it from the Unplaced tray into the Navbar or Footer list.
• Reorder — drag a page up or down within a list (arrow keys also work for fine adjustments).
• Remove a page from a menu — drag it back to the Unplaced tray (or use the remove control). The page itself isn't deleted — it just no longer appears in that menu.

A page can appear in the navbar, the footer, both, or neither. Changes save automatically as you arrange the board.

Note: Only published pages should appear in your live menus — placing a draft in the nav won't make a hidden page visible. Publish the page first, then add it to a menu.

Redirects manager

When you rename a page, replace it with a new one, or consolidate two pages into one, the old URL stops working — which breaks bookmarks and hurts your search rankings. The Redirects manager fixes that by forwarding the old path to the page that replaced it.

Open it at Website → Redirects.

To add a redirect:

1. In Old path, type the path that should be forwarded (e.g. old-about-us). Don't include your domain or a leading slash — just the path.
2. In Points to, choose the page that visitors should land on instead.
3. Click Add.

Redirects are permanent (308) — search-engine-equivalent to a 301 — so search engines pass along the old page's ranking to the new one. That makes this the SEO-safe way to rename or restructure pages.

A few rules the manager enforces for you:

• An old path can't match a live page's path — the real page always wins, so the redirect would never fire. The manager blocks this and tells you why.
• The same old path can only point to one destination. Remove the existing redirect before re-pointing it.

To remove a redirect, click the trash icon on its row.

Tip: Set up the redirect right after you rename or replace a page, while you still remember the old URL. Anyone who had the old link bookmarked will land on the right page seamlessly.

Revision history

Every save creates a snapshot, so you can always look back — or roll back — to an earlier version of a page.

• Open a page in the editor and press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + H (or pick Revision history from the topbar ⋯ menu).
• The panel lists snapshots newest first, each labeled with when it was saved and what triggered it.
• Select a snapshot to see a quick comparison (title, subtitle, section count, and a slice of the body) against the page's current content.
• Click Restore this version to bring that snapshot back.

History keeps up to 50 snapshots per page. Restoring is non-destructive: the restore itself is captured as a brand-new snapshot, so nothing is ever overwritten or lost — the history is append-only. If you restore an old version and change your mind, you can immediately restore the version you were just on.

Editorial status

Each page carries an editorial status to help teams manage who's working on what before it goes live:

The status is informational only and completely independent of the live (published/draft) state — it doesn't publish or hide anything. A glanceable status pill appears next to each page in the Pages list and in the editor topbar, so you can see at a glance which drafts are queued for review. Set the status from the page Inspector while editing.

Duplicate & delete pages

Two more housekeeping actions you'll use often (covered in more detail on Pages):

• Duplicate — clone a page (and all its blocks) as a new draft. Great for spinning up a near-identical landing page or starting from a layout you already like. The copy comes in unpublished so you can edit before it's live.
• Delete — permanently remove a page. If the page is currently published or linked in your navigation, take it offline (or set up a redirect) first so visitors don't hit a dead link.

You'll find Duplicate and Delete on each row of the Pages list, in the editor topbar ⋯ menu, and in the Cmd/Ctrl + K command palette.

A typical go-live flow

Putting it all together, here's how most teams take a new page live:

1. Create the page (blank or with AI) and edit it in the page editor.
2. Mark it In review and share a preview link with whoever needs to sign off.
3. Once approved, mark it Approved and Publish — or Schedule it for a launch time.
4. Add it to your Navbar or Footer so visitors can find it.
5. If it replaced an older page, add a Redirect from the old path.
6. If anything needs changing later, edit freely and lean on revision history to roll back if needed.

Related

• Creating and Managing Pages — page types, slugs, search, duplicate & delete
• The Page Editor — blocks, formatting, autosave, keyboard shortcuts
• AI Website Assistant — generate and draft pages with AI
• Domain, Theme & SEO — connect a custom domain and set site-wide settings