How do I save and publish changes?
The panel saves your work as you go, so you don't need to worry about losing what you've typed. That doesn't mean every keystroke goes straight onto the site your clients see, though. There's a real difference between "saved" and "published", and after publishing there's a short wait on top — both are worth understanding from your first day in the panel.
The draft saves itself
Whenever you edit a document — adding a sentence to a service description, fixing a typo in a bio, changing a phone number — the panel saves the change as a draft. There's no "Save" button. In the bottom left corner of the form you'll briefly see "Saving..." (Zapisywanie...), followed by "Saved" (Zapisano).
Only you and other people logged in to the panel can see the draft. You can close the tab halfway through, come back an hour or a week later, and your changes will be waiting exactly where you left them. The same corner tells you what state the document is in: "Edited…" (Edytowano…) with a date means unpublished changes are waiting in it, while "Published…" (Opublikowano…) means the site shows exactly what you see in the form.
The Publish button
The draft only reaches the site when you press Publish (Publikuj). You'll find it in the bar at the very bottom of the form, in the bottom right corner. That bar looks the same in every document, so once you know where it is, you know for good.
The button's label changes with the situation:
- Publish (Publikuj) — there are changes that haven't reached the site yet
- Publishing… (Publikowanie…) — the panel is passing your changes on right now
- Published (Opublikowany), greyed out — there's nothing new to publish
If you prefer the keyboard, Ctrl+Alt+P does the same thing. Right next to Publish there's also a small button with extra commands. In documents that live in lists (services, posts, team members) it includes "Discard changes" (Odrzuć zmiany), which brings back the last published version, "Unpublish" (Cofnij publikację), which takes the entry off the site, and "Delete" (Usuń).
Sometimes Publish stays inactive even though you've changed something. Almost always, that means one of the required fields is empty — the heading on the homepage, say, or a service's title. The panel marks that field in red and won't let you publish the document until you fill it in. The draft still saves in the meantime, so nothing is lost.
Why the change appears after about two minutes
Your site doesn't read content from the panel every time someone visits. It's made of ready-built pages sitting on servers in many places around the world — that's what makes it load fast and hard to overload. The price of that speed is that after every publish, the whole site has to be put together again. Think of reprinting a leaflet: fixing the text takes a second, but the new copies still have to come off the press and make it onto the stands.
All of this happens automatically, without you:
All in, it usually takes about two minutes from your click to the change being live. Sometimes it takes longer, up to a few minutes — for example when the build servers happen to be busier. Your site doesn't disappear or break in the meantime: visitors see the previous version right up to the last moment, and the new one straight after.
Publishing several times in a row isn't a problem either. If you update five services one after another, the rebuilds queue up, and once the last one finishes every change will be on the site.
What if you can't see the change
The most common cause is a mundane one: someone made a change, closed the panel, and forgot the last step. If something on the site doesn't look right, first check whether the button in that document says "Published". If it still says "Publish", the change is waiting in a draft.
If publishing did go through, wait a few minutes and refresh the page (Ctrl+F5 on a computer; on a phone, close the tab and open it again). Only if the change still hasn't appeared after fifteen minutes or so, get in touch with us — at that point something may genuinely have gone wrong while building the site.
The next step after saving your content is usually filling in the SEO tab. See How do I fill in the SEO tab?.