Publishing

When you are happy with your site, publishing is one click.

Preview vs. live

While you are editing, your site lives in a preview workspace inside VoxelSite Studio. The live version at your domain is only updated when you explicitly publish. This means you can experiment freely without affecting your live site.

What happens on publish

When you click Publish:

1. VoxelSite creates a snapshot of the current state (optional — see below)
2. Preview files are copied to the public document root
3. Schema.org structured data is generated for search engines
4. An XML sitemap (sitemap.xml) is created
5. A robots.txt file is configured to welcome both search engines and AI crawlers
6. An llms.txt file is generated for AI discovery
7. An MCP server endpoint (mcp.php) is generated
8. Actions Bar files are deployed and injected into every page (if actions exist)

Your site is live immediately — no build step, no deployment, no waiting.

Change detection

The Publish button in the status bar shows how many unpublished changes exist. It tracks all file types:

• Pages and partials (PHP files) — compared between the preview workspace and the live document root
• Styles, scripts, and data (CSS, JS, JSON) — compared against the state stored at the last publish

After every save in the code editor or AI generation, the button updates automatically. When there are no unpublished changes, it shows "Up to date."

Snapshots

Every publish creates an automatic snapshot by default. The confirmation dialog includes a "Create snapshot before publishing" checkbox — uncheck it to skip the pre-publish snapshot when you're iterating quickly. The Studio remembers your preference.

You can also create manual snapshots at any time from the History tab in Designs. Snapshots are complete copies of your site state. If something goes wrong, you can roll back to any previous snapshot.

Unpublish

Take your live site offline by clicking the chevron on the Publish button to open the dropup menu, then selecting Unpublish.

When you unpublish:

• Your live site is replaced with a clean branded placeholder showing your site name
• All preview work, snapshots, and settings remain untouched
• AEO files (llms.txt, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, mcp.php) are removed
• Your .htaccess is preserved so URL rewriting stays intact when you re-publish

Unpublishing does not delete your site — it only takes the live version offline. You can re-publish at any time.

Demo Mode note: If you plan to use Demo Mode, unpublish your site first. The demo preview site at the root URL requires the default index.php (which includes demo routing). The AI-generated index.php from a publish does not include this code.

Custom domains

VoxelSite serves your website from whatever domain points to your server. There is no subdomain limitation. Your site runs on your domain, on your server.

Re-publishing

Every time you publish, VoxelSite generates fresh copies of all derived files (sitemap, robots.txt, llms.txt, structured data). Your pages, partials, and assets are copied from preview to production. Previous versions are kept as snapshots.

Download your site

After publishing, you can also download the entire site as a ZIP file — either as PHP source or static HTML — from the Download button in the status bar. See Download & Export.

Related

• Demo Mode — turn your installation into a read-only showcase
• Download & Export — download your published site as PHP or HTML
• Undo & Snapshots — roll back to any previous state
• SEO & AI Discovery — the files generated on publish
• Actions — how the Actions Bar is deployed on publish
• Settings — configure your site URL for sitemap generation