How do I publish my website and get found on Google?

Build free and pay when you publish, check and preview your site, publish it, edit a live site in a draft, and see how you look on Google.

Part of How do I set up my venue website?. This part covers going live: paying when you publish, optional checks, how you look on Google, previewing and publishing, drafts on a live site, your other listings, and your widgets on another site.

Build free, pay when you publish

You can build your whole website before you buy Your website: on the page, press Start building — free. The same goes for sign-up: choosing Your website when you sign up costs nothing today — on Home, the welcome card's Start building your website — or, with the website on its own, the Your website card's Build your website — opens this page ready to build, and that card brings you back to it. While you're building for free nothing is public — your venue page carries on as it is. When you're ready, Publish website explains the price and Add Your website takes you to Plans and products to add it; once it's on your account, come back and press Publish website. Your website is £15 per month with any plan — Free included — or £19 per month on its own, and your own web address is included. A draft's photos can use up to 50 MB until you add the product. Rezo's writing (1 Rezo credit) is for a bought website; writing ideas are free. A draft that is never published is removed after 90 days without a sign-in (your photos stay in your image library).

Optional checks before publishing

Choose Check before publishing, beside Preview, for suggestions about practical information, photos, readability and links. The panel labels which draft it is reviewing, including unsaved edits. It also reads the relevant saved venue details; if a read fails, those details remain unverified.

Review in the editor opens the relevant section and keeps your draft. Use Run checks again after changing anything. Running checks does not save, rewrite or publish your website, and you can keep using Save, Discard and Publish as usual.

Use the existing phone and desktop previews to judge photo framing and sharpness. The checks do not test whether online links work or certify every colour over a photo, live booking availability or how the site looks on a physical device. Those remain part of your own preview before publishing.

How you look on Google — Search and sharing

The Search and sharing section shows how your venue page might look in Google's results: its title and the line under it (the same words we give search engines), its address, and today's closing time. Can be found on Google is the same setting as Hide from search engines in Settings → Venue profile, the other way round — switch it off and your pages ask search engines not to list them, though anyone with the link can still open them. It covers your venue page and website, your booking page, your gift card page and your event pages, and search engines can take days or weeks to catch up. If your account's status is keeping your pages out of search, the section says so — and if it's because you haven't added any opening hours yet, it says that instead and points you to Settings → Venue → Hours. Once your website is published, its pages are offered to search engines even before you add hours — while Can be found on Google is on; until then your venue page and booking page wait for them. With the website live and still no hours, the section reminds you that your booking page and Find us page join it once a day is open (they're offered again by themselves). Changing the switch needs the "edit operational settings" permission. Your title and address come from your venue profile. Before you have the website, the same card sits under your free venue page as How you look on Google.

Previewing and publishing

The line at the top of the page says Live or Not live yet — with a count of how many of the six optional pages are on (for example "Live · 3 of 6 pages on") — so you always know what guests are seeing.

Editing a live site without the changes going live (drafts)

Once your site is published, your edits never go live by themselves — they wait as a draft until you publish them, so you can work on the site while guests carry on seeing the current version:

Publish changes is the pink button at the top of the page and Discard draft is in More (⋯) beside it; both appear only while a draft is waiting. While the site isn't published yet, saving still writes straight to the unpublished site — nothing is visible until you publish.

After you publish: point your other listings at it

Publishing is only half of going live. The address most of your guests actually reach you through isn't the new site — it's whatever link is sitting in your Google Business Profile, your Instagram bio and your Facebook page, and publishing here doesn't change any of them. Nobody arrives at a website nobody has been told about.

Once your site is live the editor shows a Now point your other listings at it card with your address and a copy button. Three places, in the order worth doing them:

These are all edited on Google, Instagram and Facebook themselves. ResoFlow can't change them for you and won't know when you have, so there's nothing to tick off here — do them in your own time.

Putting your widgets on another site — the websites allowed to show them

Already run a website elsewhere? You can put any of your widgets there — each widget's code and the Websites allowed to show your widgets list both live at Settings → Website widgets (the editor's Embed on another site row points you there). The list covers every widget: once you add an address, browsers won't show your widgets on any other website, and bookings, purchases and sign-ups from anywhere else are refused, so another site can never quietly show your widgets. Leave the list empty and your widgets work anywhere (how they have always worked). You can list up to 10 addresses — just type the address as you'd say it (for example www.yourvenue.co.uk; with www. and without count as one) and it's tidied automatically. A change works within about a minute, even while your website is live: it isn't one of the website changes that wait for Publish changes, and publishing never changes it.

Good to know

Related: How do I set up my venue website? · How do I choose my website's look and layout? · How do I use my own domain for my web address and email? · How do I get more bookings from Google, Apple Maps and social media?