Tabern

Publishing

How saving and publishing differ, how to tell when your live site is behind, and how to take it offline.

Video walkthrough coming soonThe written steps below cover everything in the meantime.

Saving versus publishing

Guests see a published copy of your site, not your dashboard directly. When you save in My Website, Menu Manager, Deals & Promos, Hours & Location, or Website Settings, the change is stored, but guests keep seeing the last published version until you click Publish. A half-finished edit never shows up on your live site.

A few settings take effect as soon as you save, without publishing. The most important one is your subdomain: see Sharing & SEO.

Publish

  1. Save your edits and check the preview.

  2. Click Publish in the page header. On a phone, it's under Actions.

  3. Wait for the Published message. Your site is now live at your web address.

Publish is in the header of My Website, Menu Manager, Deals & Promos, Hours & Location, and Website Settings. Whichever page you use, it puts everything you've saved live at once: website content, menu, deals, locations and hours, your temporary notice, and settings. On My Website, Publish saves any unsaved edits first.

Changes that publish automatically

Two actions republish your whole site on their own, including any other saved changes:

  • Saving your rewards program, or turning it on or off, in Customers → Rewards.
  • Connecting or removing an integration in Settings → Integrations.

The unpublished-changes banner

Once your site is live, a banner appears at the top of the dashboard whenever you have saved changes that aren't on your live site yet: "You have saved changes that aren't on your live site yet. Publish to show them to guests." Click Publish now to publish from whatever page you're on. The banner goes away when your live site matches your dashboard. It doesn't appear before your first publish.

Unpublish

  1. Open My Website.

  2. Click Unpublish (on a phone: Actions → Unpublish site).

  3. Confirm. Visitors see a not-found page until you publish again.

Your content stays in the dashboard, so you can publish again whenever you're ready.

Fixing a mistake

There's no rollback button in the dashboard. To undo a published change, edit the content back to what you want, then publish again. Publishing never changes your saved content, so your dashboard is exactly what you last saved.

Plans and publishing

  • Who can publish: a free website (earned by buying or activating a Tabern device) or a website on the paid plan. A website with neither can be edited but not published. See Orders & cards and Billing & subscription.
  • Canceling the paid plan: paid features stay on until the end of the billing period. After that, your free card-backed website stays published on the free plan. Any other website goes offline.
  • Failed payment: your site stays live and keeps its paid features while Stripe retries the payment.
  • Losing your free website (for example, a refunded device order): the site goes offline unless it has the paid plan. If you qualify again later, publish it again yourself.