Staging and Live
Every site is reachable from the moment it exists, long before a domain is involved.
What It Is
A Webby site is reachable from the moment it is set up. It gets a staging address — a working web address you can open, click around and send to a colleague — without any domain configuration at all.
Going live is a separate step: you point your own domain at the site, and from then on that domain is the one visitors use. Nothing forces you to do it early. Plenty of sites sit on staging for weeks while the pages are written.
How It Works
Each site card on My Sites carries a status, which tells you where the site is in its life and which buttons it offers.
A site in setup is waiting for you to finish the wizard. A staging site is fully usable but not on your domain. A live site is serving your domain. A retired site is one that used to serve a domain and has since been replaced by another site.
Publishing a page and going live are not the same thing. You publish pages as you finish them, whether or not the site is on a domain — on a staging site, publishing makes the page visible at the staging address.
What each status means
| Status | What it means | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| In setup | The wizard has not been finished. | Continue setup. No pages yet. |
| Staging | Set up and reachable at its staging address, not on your domain. | Build and publish pages, change settings, go live when ready. |
| Live | Serving your own domain. | Everything, including moving the site to a different domain. |
| Retired | Its domain now serves a different site. | Read the pages and inspect the settings. Nothing can be published. |
Why It Matters
Working on staging first is the whole point. You can get the header right, publish a few pages, show somebody, change your mind about the palette and rebuild a page — all without anyone arriving at a half-finished site on your real address.
It also means going live is uneventful. By the time you point the domain, you have already seen every page exactly as it will appear.
Info: A retired site is deliberately read-only, and its links are removed rather than left pointing somewhere misleading. Its old domain belongs to the site that replaced it, so sending you there would show somebody else's pages.
