Trust and polish for a hosted site

Publishing a site does more than upload your files. A few small, honest things happen automatically so a freshly published site already looks and behaves like a finished one.

Smaller images, automatically

When you publish from the OS, any large PNG or JPEG image in your site is automatically resized (nothing wider than 2000 pixels) and converted to WebP if that comes out smaller - the original stays out of what gets uploaded, and every place your pages reference it is updated to the new file automatically. You don't have to do anything, and nothing changes about how the image looks in a browser. After a publish that converted any images, you'll see how much space it saved.

This only happens when you publish from the OS itself (the button in Settings, or asking the assistant to publish). A site published through a background automation publishes images exactly as they are.

Favicon and app icon

Every published site gets a small icon in the browser tab and an entry it can be "installed" from, even if you never set one up - the OS generates a simple icon from your site's name and adds it automatically. If you've already added your own favicon.ico or favicon.svg, yours is always used instead and nothing is generated.

A plain privacy page

Every publish adds a short, honest privacy page if your site doesn't already have one - it explains, in plain language, what a contact form collects, whether there's a newsletter, and that page-view counting doesn't use cookies or track you across sites. It's linked from your site's footer automatically, if your site has one.

You can turn this off in a site's settings if you'd rather write your own, or don't want one generated at all.

Is my site up?

Every published site is checked automatically every few minutes from a real visitor's point of view. You can see the last two days of checks and the current uptime percentage from a site's settings. There's also a small status badge image you can put on your own site or anywhere else that shows "up" or "down" at a glance.

If a site stops responding for more than a couple of checks in a row, that's treated the same as any other incident - see the SRE Agent guide for what happens next if you have that add-on active.

Preview before you commit

Any version you've published recently can be previewed on its own private link, without making it live - useful for checking a fix before you decide to keep it, or sharing a not-yet-public version with someone else. A preview link works for seven days and then stops working on its own; there's nothing to remember to revoke.

You can also preview exactly what's currently sitting in your site's folder, unpublished, to see what the next publish would look like before you actually publish it.

Rolling back quickly

If something looks wrong right after a publish, you don't have to wait: you can preview the previous version and, if it looks right, roll straight back to it with one click - the same rollback you'd use from a site's settings, just one step closer when you're looking at an active incident.