Publishing your staging changes to your live site

When staging looks the way you want it, click Publish to production on the Staging tab. Your posts, pages, design and settings move onto your live site, and the whole thing takes a minute or two.

Nothing reaches your subscribers in the process. Newsletters aren't sent, and no post you publish on staging goes out as an email on your live site without you pressing publish there.

What moves

• Posts and pages, with their tags, authors, tier access and metadata – as drafts only
• Tags and snippets
• Your newsletters, with their names, descriptions and design
• Your active theme, its files and its settings
• Routes and redirects
• Site settings: title, description, colours, navigation, the announcement bar, comments, analytics, and the wording on your sign-up form

What never moves

• Members and their subscriptions
• Tiers, offers and your Stripe connection
• Staff accounts
• Email sending settings: your sending domain, open and click tracking, and the addresses replies and support mail go to
• Donation settings, your privacy setting and any integration keys

Anything to do with money or your subscriber list stays exactly as it is on your live site.

New posts arrive as drafts

A post you wrote and published on staging lands on your live site as a draft. You open it in your editor and publish it from there. That's what sends the newsletter and triggers anything else you've connected, in the normal way.

Posts that already exist on your live site keep the state they're in. Editing one on staging updates its content, not whether it's published.

One case to watch: a new post you scheduled on staging arrives scheduled, so your live site will publish it, and email it, at that time.

Deleting on staging doesn't delete on your live site

A post that only exists on your live site is left alone. The confirmation dialog lists those under "Only on production – kept", so you can see what's staying. To remove something from your live site, delete it there.

Choosing which posts to publish

Click Show details in the dialog and you'll see every post that's new or changed, with a checkbox each. Clear the ones you're not ready for and only the rest are published.

Before you confirm

The dialog counts what's about to change: posts and pages updated, new ones added, posts kept, whether your active theme is changing, and whether routes and redirects differ. Type your site's domain to confirm, then click the publish button.

What happens while it runs

Six steps, in this order:

1. Checking readiness
2. Backing up production
3. Publishing content and settings
4. Updating theme, routes and redirects
5. Restarting your site
6. Verifying it's live

Your live site shows a maintenance page for the minute or two around the restart. If it doesn't come back healthy afterwards, we restore the backup from step 2 automatically and your site ends up exactly as it was. That backup is separate from your daily backups, which keep running as usual. If you use search, the index is rebuilt after a successful publish.

Push history

Every publish is logged at the bottom of the Staging tab with its outcome:

• Published worked.
• Reverted failed partway and your live site was restored to the backup.
• Failed stopped before anything changed on your live site.
• Needs attention means the restore didn't finish either. Message us with the date and we'll put your site right.

If the publish won't start

The most common reason is that staging and your live site are on different versions of Ghost, which happens when one of them has picked up an update the other hasn't. Refresh staging from your live site first, then publish.