Preview, publish and version history
How the draft reaches your visitors, how to go back, and how to take the shop off the web.
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Preview
Preview opens your shop in a new tab, showing the current draft — including changes you have not published.
Your own preview keeps working even while the shop is not reachable for visitors, which is what lets you finish a shop before anyone else can see it.
What the preview cannot do
Two things are switched off in the preview. A notice explains each one when you run into it:
- Paying. The order stops just before the payment page. In the live shop Stripe's page opens there, and the designer cannot show it — and a look at the design should not produce a real order.
- Subscriptions. Same reason: the subscribe button also ends on a page of Stripe's.
- Customer accounts. Creating one and signing in are locked. Your shop's customers and your dashboard share one login per browser, so signing in as a customer would sign you out of your own dashboard.
To try a purchase from end to end, use the published shop rather than the preview.
Publish
Publish makes the current designer version live. That is the only moment your visitors see anything change.
The Overview page lists unpublished design changes among the things needing attention, so a draft never sits forgotten.
Publishing alone does not make the shop publicly reachable. It still needs a payment method and all five legal texts — see Going live.
Version history
The clock icon in the toolbar opens Version History, where you can roll back to any previous version.
A rollback creates a new draft. Your live shop only changes when you press Publish afterwards — so you can roll back, look at it, and decide.
Taking the shop offline
Once something has been published, a green Online button sits at the end of the toolbar. Clicking it takes the published shop off the web:
- visitors get a 404
- your dashboard and your preview keep working
- nothing is deleted
The button then disappears, and Publish is what puts the shop back online.
What publishing does not touch
These are live the moment you save them, with no publish step:
- Products, prices and stock
- Orders, shipments and invoices
- Settings, including legal texts and payment methods
- Discount codes and volume discounts
- Whether reviews are switched on
Publishing is only about the design: blocks, pages, theme and their content.