How to publish a cloned site
Overview
Publishing a Clonerix project to the public internet takes roughly 30 seconds end to end. Every plan, including Free, includes built-in global edge hosting with automatic HTTPS encryption, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited traffic. This article walks through publishing to a Clonerix subdomain, republishing after edits, previewing changes before going live, and common publish-related troubleshooting.
Publishing custom domains is a larger topic with its own dedicated help article. This guide focuses on the simpler default subdomain publishing path.
Before you publish
Publishing is the last step in the workflow. Before you click Publish, run through this short checklist. Fixing issues before publish is almost always faster than fixing them after.
- Text pass. Read every headline, subhead, body paragraph, feature bullet, button label, and footer string. A common mistake is leaving one line of source-site text deep in a footer or FAQ.
- Image pass. Verify that every hero image, product photo, testimonial headshot, icon, decorative illustration, and background image is one you have rights to use and looks correct at every breakpoint.
- Link pass. Click every primary call-to-action, secondary call-to-action, navigation link, footer legal link, and anchor link. Broken or incorrect button destinations are the single most common post-publish bug report.
- Breakpoint pass. Preview the page at desktop, tablet, and mobile breakpoints inside the editor. Scroll slowly. Pay special attention to text wrapping, image cropping, and button touch targets on mobile.
- Script pass. Verify that every tracking pixel, analytics script, chat widget, and A/B testing tool you expect is configured either at the project level or on the appropriate pages.
- SEO pass. Open the Page SEO panel for every page you are publishing. Manually fill in the meta title, meta description, Open Graph image, Twitter card image, and canonical URL.
Publishing to a Clonerix subdomain
Open the project in the visual editor. If the publish button in the top right is green and says Publish, the project has never been published to the public internet before. If it says Republish, there is already at least one previously published version.
Click the Publish or Republish button. The publish dialog opens.
Under Destination, choose Clonerix subdomain. Custom domain publishing is covered in the dedicated custom domain help article and requires a Max or Enterprise plan.
Under Subdomain name, type the subdomain you would like to use. Names must be between 4 and 63 characters long, and may contain lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. Spaces, uppercase letters, special characters, and underscores are not allowed. Names are globally unique across all Clonerix projects. If your first choice is already taken, the input field shows an inline error and you should try a different name.
Many users append a short descriptor if their brand name is already taken: brand-home, brand-lp1, brand-offer, brand-landing, and so on. You can always publish additional projects to different subdomains later.
Click Publish now at the bottom of the dialog. The build process begins and a progress bar appears. The build typically takes 15 to 30 seconds depending on the number of pages and images in the project.
Once the build completes successfully, you see a success dialog with two buttons: Copy link and Open in new tab. Click Open in new tab to verify the published site immediately in a fresh browser context.
What happens during a publish
When you click Publish, Clonerix runs several steps automatically. Understanding them is not required but helps diagnose rare issues.
First, the editor snapshot is validated. Every component state, text value, styling override, image reference, and script configuration is serialized and checked for internal consistency. Validation failures usually surface as an inline error with a recommendation to fix a specific element.
Second, a production build is generated. Each page renders through the production pipeline. Styles are extracted, minified, and deduped. Images are recompressed, converted to modern formats like AVIF and WebP, and resized into a responsive srcset with multiple resolutions. JavaScript bundles are minified and code-split.
Third, the build artifacts are uploaded to global object storage and invalidated across all POPs (points of presence) on the Clonerix CDN edge network. Cache invalidation typically finishes within a few seconds globally.
Fourth, for subdomain publishes the DNS entry is created if this is the first publish, and the HTTPS certificate is issued or renewed via the automated certificate authority. Certificates are issued for both the subdomain and the www variant of it, with automatic renewal scheduled 30 days before expiration.
Republishing after edits
After the first publish, the Publish button changes to say Republish. Every time you make a change in the editor, Republish takes that change and pushes it live.
Republish follows the exact same pipeline as first-time publish. A full new build is generated every time, and every edge cache is invalidated for the project. The end-to-end time for a republish is typically faster than the first publish because the DNS entry and certificate already exist. Expect roughly 10 to 20 seconds from click to globally live changes.
There is no limit on the number of republishes. You can republish a project as many times as you want on any plan tier.
Rolling back to a previous version
Every publish creates an immutable snapshot of the project at that point in time. If you publish a change, immediately realize it broke something, and need to undo, rollback is one click.
Open the Version history panel from the left sidebar. You see a chronological list of every publish and major editor save point, each with a timestamp, the editor user who made the change, and a one-line summary.
Find the last published version you know worked correctly. Click the three-dot menu to the right of that entry and choose Restore and publish. The project state reverts to that previous version and a new build is generated from the reverted state. The entire process takes about the same amount of time as a normal republish.
Rolling back does not destroy newer history. The newer versions you rolled past remain available in the version history in case you change your mind again.
Previewing before publish
For changes you are uncertain about, use the Preview feature instead of publishing directly. The Preview button is in the top toolbar next to Republish.
Preview generates a one-off build of the project in its current state and makes it available at a long, unguessable preview URL. Preview builds are not indexed by search engines, do not show up on your public production domain, and have a random URL that is effectively private for all practical purposes.
Share the preview URL with teammates, clients, or stakeholders for review. When everyone has approved, hit Republish on the production domain to push it live.
Preview URLs expire automatically seven days after generation.
Unpublishing a project
If you want to take a published project down from the public internet, open Project settings, navigate to the Publishing section, and click Unpublish project.
Unpublishing deletes the DNS entry, expires the CDN cache, and removes the HTTPS certificate. The project itself is not deleted. It remains in your dashboard in a fully editable unpublished state. You can republish again at any time, either to the same subdomain name (if it has not been claimed by another user in the meantime) or to a different one.
Projects deleted from the dashboard are automatically unpublished as part of the deletion process. You do not need to explicitly unpublish before deleting.
Common publishing problems
"Subdomain is already taken" error during first publish. That exact name was registered by another Clonerix user. Try a slightly modified name with a suffix. Common suffixes are -home, -site, -lp, -offer, -launch, or a short numeric suffix like -2 or -v2.
Published site looks the same as before my edits. Two common causes. First, browser cache. Hard-refresh the live page with Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows or Linux, Cmd+Shift+R on Mac. If that fixes it, the issue was your local browser cache, not Clonerix. Second, if the cache is not the culprit, double-check that you actually clicked Republish after making the edits. It is surprisingly common to edit, close the tab, and forget to hit the button.
Site loads in HTTP instead of HTTPS. For a newly published project, certificate issuance can take up to a minute after the publish succeeds. Wait 60 seconds, clear browser cache, and try again. If it still does not work after five minutes, contact support with the exact project URL.
Images are missing on the published site but present in the editor. Almost always caused by an asset that was uploaded to the editor but never fully finished processing because the browser tab was closed before the upload completed. Re-upload the affected images in the editor and republish once.
Tracking script installed but not firing on the live site. First, test from a browser profile without ad blockers or script-blocking extensions. Approximately half of all "script not firing" support tickets turn out to be a local ad blocker. Second, double-check the ID you entered into the template field. A single digit typo in a Pixel ID or Measurement ID is another extremely common cause. Third, confirm the script was added at the project level, not only on the wrong individual page.
After publishing checklist
Once the site is live, spend five minutes on the following post-publish validation steps in a clean incognito browser profile:
- Open the live URL and confirm you see the expected page, not an error or a cached old version.
- Scroll through the full page once, verifying no broken image placeholders appear.
- Click every primary and secondary call-to-action button. Confirm each destination URL is correct.
- Resize the browser window through tablet and mobile widths to confirm responsive behavior.
- Open browser developer tools, Console tab. Confirm there are no red error messages.
- Switch to the Network tab in developer tools and reload. Confirm your tracking scripts appear in the request list with successful 200 status responses.
- Share the live URL in a chat window or social preview to verify that Open Graph metadata and social card imagery render correctly.
- Run the URL through the free Google Rich Results Test and PageSpeed Insights tools. Check for major structural issues.
If everything passes, you are done. Congratulations on your published Clonerix site.
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