Publishing and exporting

Publishing is the final step in the website construction process, where your Sitely layouts are transformed into a fully viewable website. This includes converting them into HTML, CSS, images, and JavaScript.

You can publish your site either when you've finished building it or for a live test. To initiate publishing, you can use the "Publish website..." option in the File menu or the "Publish" icon in the toolbar. 

During your initial publish, you'll need to set up a location. Simply click on the “Setup…” button to begin.

A publishing location stores all settings, making updating the site as easy as a single click. Sitely also uses this location information to publish only the files that have actually changed.

Where to Publish

To publish your site to the web, you'll need to have a hosting plan with a web hosting company, as this isn't included in Sitely. We generally recommend any of the top sites listed on this ReviewSignal page.

Sitely provides two options:

Publish to the web: Sitely will transfer files to your web host using its built-in FTP client.

Export to disk: Sitely will generate the files on disk, and you'll need to transfer them on your own using a third-party tool such as Cyberduck or FileZilla.

Export to Disk

Exporting to disk is straightforward. You'll be asked to choose a folder and name the location. Additionally, you can choose the text encoding option to represent non-ASCII characters in the webpage code. By default, Sitely conservatively defaults to ASCII text, but you can set it to UTF-8 for a more compact page source if your server is compatible.

By default Sitely produces high performance HTML that works when uploaded to a web server. If you intend to load the HTML files directly in the browser from the local disk you will need to set the code generation option to “Offline compatible”.

Some website features can’t work in offline compatible mode due to the reliance on PHP (which can only run on a web server) or because of how underlying component works.

Publish to the Web

Publishing to the web is more complex but allows for subsequent updates with just a few clicks. Initially, you'll need to provide Sitely with the web address where your site will live, without including any details about the hosting.

After setting up, Sitely will attempt to auto-detect the server folder where your site will reside. In some cases, assistance may be needed to complete the setup, such as if your web host uses a folder naming scheme that Sitely isn't familiar with.