Version history and staging

Every time a website is published, the version it replaces is kept. Version history lists them with the date, the person who published, any note written in the Publish dialog, and their state: the one that is live, and any that sit on a staging address.

Preview opens any version exactly as visitors saw it, which is the honest way to answer "what did it look like before?" and the quickest way to copy a sentence from the old wording.

Each older version has Make live and Restore. Make live puts that version in front of visitors straight away: its pages, design and settings. The products stay as they are now, because products are published on their own, and anything changed in the editor since stays in the draft for later. The version it replaces is kept, so it can be undone the same way.

Restore copies the version into the editor instead, products included, replacing the current draft. Nothing changes for visitors until you publish, which makes it the careful choice when the old version is a starting point rather than the answer.

With Pro, a website can also have staging addresses: private copies, each with a name and a password, for showing the next version to a client before it is public. Send to staging puts the current draft there, behind the password, and the client sees the real site rather than screenshots.

When the client says yes, Make it live promotes exactly the version they approved, products included, which removes the last gap between what they saw and what goes public.