There are plenty of things you can do with your site and you can easily make amendments after your site has been published. However, this tutorial is going to teach you how to publish your site. When you are ready, let's proceed to the final step in creating a website.
Please note: If you selected your domain name when you first created your website, your site will already be published. Any time you want to apply your latest changes to your published site, simply click Publish.
If you have not yet published your site, please review the instructions below:
Step 1: Select a publishing option
1. Click Publish.
2. A dialog box will open up and you will see three publishing options:
- Search for a custom domain (you can also take a look at Buying your own domain from Yola).
- Try a free Yola subdomain.
- Already own a domain (only available to Yola Bronze, Yola Silver, and Yola Gold subscribers).
For now, we are going to use option two (Try a free Yola subdomain) but the other options are available for you to use should you prefer. If you have not purchased your own domain name, or you don't want to do so right now, then option two is the one for you!
The text box will be automatically populated based on the name you have given your site. You can opt to keep this as your subdomain name or decide on a different name. Once you've typed in the subdomain name, you will get a message stating whether the name you have chosen is available.
If you are told that the subdomain is unavailable, this means that it has already been registered and you need to select a different name. If you see the message "Invalid Domain!", this means that you have used a character that is not permitted and you need to make the necessary adjustment. Valid subdomain names can only contain alphanumeric characters and no spaces.


Step 2: View your published site
You can access your site any time by clicking on the link, or by typing your website address into the address bar of your browser. If you ever need to check what your web address is, you can go to Settings > Publishing. The web address will be displayed in the "Your site is published" and in the "Your Domains" section.
Please note: Your site is live on the internet and people can visit it as soon as it is published. However, to begin with, you will not be able to search for your site by typing the address into a search box (such as Google and Bing).
This is because it takes time for newly published sites to be indexed so that they become searchable. If you are interested in reading more about getting your site found on search engines, take a look at our Promotion, SEO, Traffic and Advertising tutorials for information about how to get started with SEO.
Step 3: Editing your published site
Once you've made changes in the Sitebuilder and are ready for them to be applied to your published site, click the Publish button.
If you wish to remove your site from the internet, you can unpublish it:
1. Go to Settings > Publishing and click Unpublish Site.
2. A dialog box will open up asking to confirm if you want to unpublish.
3. Type "Unpublish" into the text box provided and click Unpublish Site.
4. Your site is now unpublished. You can always publish again at a later stage if you wish.
Please note: If you had your site published to a subdomain and you unpublish it, your subdomain becomes available to be used by other people. If you published your site to a domain purchased through Yola, or a domain you purchased elsewhere, you will keep your domain.