---
title: "Publish a website"
slug: "publish-a-website"
abstract: "You can publish a website in the Content Editor and the Sitecore Desktop by choosing between Smart publishing, Incremental publishing, and Republish."
---
# Publish a website

When you are ready to publish your website, you can run the publishing wizard from the Content Editor and the Sitecore Desktop.

> [!note]
> Do not modify the Master database while you are publishing. This can lead to items not being published correctly.

To publish the entire website:

1. Open the **Publish Site** wizard from one of two locations in Sitecore:
    - From the **Content Editor** – on the **Publish** tab, in the **Publish** group, click the **Publish** drop-down arrow, and select **Publish site**.

        ![The Publish menu on the Content Editor ribbon](https://doc.sitecore.com/api/markdown-image/xp/en/users/104/sitecore-experience-platform/images/0F8082A146404CBAB6AC8956F7B480A0.png)

    - From the **Sitecore Desktop** – click **Sitecore Start** ![342D17D167F14628AA2DB3A1D45A23D5.png](https://doc.sitecore.com/api/markdown-image/xp/en/users/104/sitecore-experience-platform/images/342D17D167F14628AA2DB3A1D45A23D5.png) > **Publish site**.

        ![The Sitecore Desktop Start menu](https://doc.sitecore.com/api/markdown-image/xp/en/users/104/sitecore-experience-platform/images/5C561887449B45A3A310476063345D1F.png)

2. In the **Publish Site** dialog, in the **Publishing** section, select the publishing mode for the website:
    - **Incremental Publish** – publishes only the items that were added to the publish queue in the Master database in the last 30 days.

        > [!note]
        > Incremental Publish is only available when you publish the entire website.

        To be added to the publishing queue, an item must have been created, saved, copied, cloned, deleted, or archived, and must have reached the last step of approval if workflows were implemented for the item.

        > [!note]
        > Items are cleared automatically from the queue after 30 days, even if they were not published. Choose a different publishing mode to publish the changes that were made more than 30 days ago, or ask a developer to customize the publishing queue differently.

        Incremental publishing is the fastest way of publishing because it uses the prepopulated publishing queue to determine which items should get published.

    - **Smart Publish** – publishes all items that have changed since the last publication. When you use Smart publish, every item version in the Master database is compared with the equivalent item version in the target database. If an item version has changed, it is published.

        Sitecore uses the versioned **Revision** field to determine if an item version has changed. Comparing all items in the database makes this a time-consuming way of publishing your entire website, particularly if the content tree contains many items.

    - **Republish** – publishes everything. Republish overwrites every item in the target database with the equivalent item from the Master database, even if it has not changed. In this way, republishing removes all obsolete versions from the target database. You can use republishing to bring a new web database online, to restore a backup of the Master database, and to add a new content language, a new publishing target, or other system items to the website.

        ![The Publish Site dialog box](https://doc.sitecore.com/api/markdown-image/xp/en/users/104/sitecore-experience-platform/images/950F100A92D44639968C4D92A2AE745B.png)

3. In the **Publishing language** section, select the language versions that you want to publish.
4. In the **Publishing targets** section, select the publishing targets that you want to publish to.

    > [!note]
    > If you do not select a publishing target, the website is published to all the publishing targets.

5. Click **Publish**. When the publishing completes, you can see how many items were processed during publishing and the number of items created, deleted, or updated on the target database.