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Preview, publish, custom domains, snapshots, and rolling back

Free slug.itzseo.com subdomain, custom domain CNAME, snapshot history, roll back a previous publish, undo broken changes to your homepage.

Web DesignUpdated
Quick answer
How do I publish a website on my own domain instead of *.itzseo.com?
Quick answer
How do I undo a published change?

The publishing flow has three layers: Preview (always-on, draft-only, only you and your team can see it), Publish to slug.itzseo.com (free, public, one click), and Custom domain (your own domain via CNAME, plan-gated).

Rolled back / broke your homepage? Every publish creates a snapshot. Open the Publish modal, switch to the Snapshots tab, find a previous version, click Restore. Your site rolls back to that snapshot in seconds. Snapshots are kept for 30 days by default.

Preview vs publish

The preview iframe at the centre of the workbench always reflects your draft — every chat turn, edit, and asset change is reflected there in seconds, even before you publish. The preview URL is private to your workspace; you can share it with logged-in collaborators only.

Publishing creates a public, immutable snapshot of the entire site (HTML, CSS, JS, assets) and serves it from CDN-cached infrastructure. The draft and the published version diverge from that point on — you can keep editing the draft without affecting what visitors see, then publish again when you're ready.

Publishing to slug.itzseo.com

Click Publish in the top bar. The first time you publish a site, you'll be asked to pick a slug. The slug must be lowercase, 3–30 characters, letters / numbers / hyphens only. Once chosen, your site is reachable at:

  • https://your-slug.itzseo.com — home page
  • https://your-slug.itzseo.com/about — subpages

Old .html URLs (e.g. your-slug.itzseo.com/about.html) are 301 redirected to the canonical bare-slug URL, so any links published to social or email keep working.

To republish after edits, click Publish again. A new snapshot is created; the public URL serves the new version within seconds. To change your slug, open the publish modal and click the slug field — note that doing so breaks any existing inbound links.

Custom domains

To serve from your own domain (e.g. www.acme.com):

  1. Open the publish modal, click + Add custom domain, type your domain (with or without www.) and click Add.
  2. We show you a CNAME record to add at your DNS provider (Cloudflare, Namecheap, GoDaddy, etc.). It looks like:
    CNAME www → cname.itzseo.com
  3. Add the record at your DNS provider and click Verify. Verification typically completes within minutes; longer if your TTL is high.
  4. Once verified, your domain is live with an automatic Let's Encrypt SSL certificate. Re-issue is automatic.

For root domains (without www.) most providers require an ALIAS or ANAME record instead of a CNAME — Cloudflare's "CNAME flattening" handles this automatically. The publish modal shows provider-specific guidance for the most common DNS hosts.

Snapshots and restoring

Every publish creates a snapshot. Open Publish history from the publish modal to see all of them, with timestamps and a "publishing user" attribution. From any historical snapshot you can:

  • View — opens the historical version in a new tab (the URL is signed and short-lived).
  • Restore as draft — copies the snapshot back over your draft so you can iterate from that point (your current draft becomes part of the undo history, never lost).
  • Republish — make this old snapshot the live version directly.

Snapshots are kept for the lifetime of the project on paid plans. Free plans keep the most recent 10.

Plan limits

Sites you build are unlimited; what's plan-gated is publishing and custom domains:

  • Free — 1 published site, slug-only, 10-snapshot retention.
  • Starter — 5 published sites, 1 custom domain.
  • Growth — 25 published sites, 10 custom domains.
  • Scale — unlimited published sites and custom domains.

When you hit a limit, the publish modal shows a clear upgrade prompt — no surprise charges. To free up a slot, unpublish a site you no longer need (the draft and history are kept; the public URL just stops resolving).

SEO defaults

Every published site ships with sensible defaults out of the box: per-page <title> and meta description (editable in the page settings drawer), Open Graph image (defaults to a screenshot of the page), robots.txt allowing indexing, and an auto-generated sitemap.xml at /sitemap.xml. Override any of these per page via the page settings drawer or by editing the HTML head directly in the code panel.

Unpublishing

To take a site offline, open the publish modal and click Unpublish. The slug becomes available for reuse on another site after 24 hours. Custom domains return a 404 immediately (and you can re-point the DNS away when convenient). Snapshots are preserved — you can republish any time without losing history.

Troubleshooting

  • Custom domain stuck on "Pending verification". Confirm the CNAME points exactly at cname.itzseo.com (no trailing dot, no https://). Some DNS hosts cache for hours; click Verify again later.
  • Old .html URLs in social shares. They still work — we 301-redirect them to the canonical bare-slug URL automatically.
  • Forms work in preview but not in published. Almost always a missing notification recipient or a typo'd redirect URL. Check the form's settings.
  • Image broken after asset delete. Restore the asset, or upload a replacement with the same filename (the URL is filename-keyed within a site).
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