How to preview your website

Before publishing, you can preview your website to check your design and catch anything that needs adjusting. The Website Builder gives you a few ways to do this, and none of them make your changes visible to readers. Your site only updates for visitors when you click Publish to live site and publish either an individual page or a full website experience for your visitors. 

While editing, use the Device View toggle in the Preview toolbar at the bottom of the canvas to switch between Desktop and Mobile layouts. This lets you confirm your design adapts correctly to different screen sizes as you work.

This view is live on the canvas, not a separate preview mode. Any edits you make on the canvas while in Mobile view are applied to your design.

You can open a full preview of your draft site (how your site will look when published) from two places in the builder:

• From the Preview toolbar: Click Preview in the toolbar at the bottom of the canvas.
  
  
  
• From the publish options: Click the arrow next to Publish in the top-right corner, then click Preview draft site.
  
  

Both options save your most recent changes and open your draft site so you can review it before committing to a publish.

For dynamic pages such as your Post page, a page selector will appear when you click Preview. Choose the specific entry you want to preview (for example, a particular post), then click on Preview. The draft site will open on that page. 

A preview is not always a perfect match for your published site, because of two things worth knowing:

Placeholder data: If the placeholder data toggle is turned on in your builder Settings, your preview will show sample content rather than your real posts. Turn the toggle off to see how your actual content will appear. For more, see Replacing placeholder content and template text on your website.

Template text: If your published site (or preview) shows generic copy from your template (for example, "The Atlas Collective" or a placeholder tagline), that text is baked into the template and won't auto-update from your publication settings. You need to replace it manually by clicking directly on the text in the builder and typing your own copy. See Replacing placeholder content and template text on your website for step-by-step instructions.

When you navigate to Website from your account's left panel, the Website overview section at the top shows a thumbnail of your published site alongside key details like your domain, last published date, and page count.

This thumbnail reflects your current live site, not your draft. To open the builder and make changes, click Edit website in the top-right corner of the overview. For a full breakdown of the dashboard, see Website dashboard overview.