Tabern

Publishing model

What Publish copies, what stays live without publishing, and what takes a site offline.

Your public site doesn't change while you edit. It shows a frozen copy of your site, the published snapshot, until you publish again. Saving stores your changes in the dashboard; publishing copies all of them to the live site at once. This page explains the rules.

Saved changes vs. the live site

  • Saved changes — what you see in the dashboard. Edit freely; guests never see this copy.
  • Published snapshot — the copy guests see on your subdomain (and custom domain, if you have one). It stays exactly as it was when you last published.

Saving never touches the live site, so a half-finished edit can't break it. The flip side: nothing you save shows up for guests until you publish.

One publish publishes everything

My Website, Menu Manager, Deals & Promos, Hours & Location, and Website Settings each have a Publish button. They all do the same thing: build a fresh snapshot of the whole site from everything you've saved and put it live. Publishing from Menu Manager also publishes a saved change to your About section, for example.

A few actions publish for you, right after they save:

  • Publishing, pausing, resuming, or deleting your rewards card in Customers → Rewards.
  • Connecting, editing, or removing an integration in Settings → Integrations.

What a snapshot contains

  • Your website content and branding: name, tagline, background images, logo, About, story gallery, page intros, favicon, and languages
  • Active menus, with their Active items, prices, and photos
  • Active deals
  • Locations, hours, contact details, and the temporary notice
  • Booking and ordering integrations
  • Your rewards card, but only when it's active and the venue is on the paid plan

Items and deals set to Draft are left out. A paused rewards card, or any rewards card on a venue without the paid plan, is also left out, so the live site never links to a rewards page that can't work. A snapshot published before the venue lost the paid plan keeps its rewards link until the next publish.

What changes without publishing

A few things are read live, not from the snapshot:

  • Your subdomain — a new subdomain takes effect the moment you save it in Website Settings. See Subdomains & URLs.
  • Your custom domain — it starts and stops working as its setup finishes or you remove it.
  • Google review text — synced reviews appear as soon as you sync. Whether the reviews section shows at all follows the Show reviews on your website toggle, and that toggle only takes effect when you publish.
  • The rewards page itself — milestones, card design, member cards, and wallet passes come straight from your rewards card. Only the Rewards link in your site's menu and footer depends on the snapshot.

The unpublished-changes banner

When your site is published and your saved content differs from the live snapshot, the dashboard shows: "You have saved changes that aren’t on your live site yet. Publish to show them to guests." Its Publish now button publishes the whole site. The banner compares content, so deleting something counts as a change too. It doesn't appear while the site is unpublished.

Unpublishing

On My Website, Unpublish (Unpublish site in the mobile menu) takes the site offline after you confirm. Visitors get a "Page not found" page, and tap cards linked to the venue show a "coming soon" message. Everything you've saved stays in the dashboard. Publish again to bring the site back.

Who can publish

  • Free — yes. Your account's free website can publish without a subscription.
  • Paid — yes. The venue counts as paid while its subscription is active, trialing, waiting on a retried payment, or canceled but not yet at the end of the paid period.
  • No tier — no. Publish shows "Publish failed" until the venue has a subscription again or your account regains its free website.

See Billing & subscription and Orders & cards.

When a site goes offline on its own

  • A subscription ends or a trial expires — if the venue is your account's free website and the account still qualifies for it, it drops to Free and stays live. Otherwise it's unpublished.
  • Your account loses its free-website eligibility — the free website stays live while the account still has an active card or a device order that hasn't been refunded. When both are gone (a card transferred away or retired, an order refunded), the free website is unpublished unless it has its own paid subscription.
  • Getting eligible again doesn't republish — when you resubscribe or activate a card, publish again yourself.

Your saved content is never deleted when a site goes offline.

Fixing published mistakes

There's no version history or undo in the dashboard. To fix a mistake on the live site, change it back in the dashboard and publish again. Each publish replaces the previous snapshot completely.