I changed it and the website didn't change

Work down this list in order. The most likely cause comes first.

Check in a private window before you do anything else. Open a private/incognito window and go to your live website. That single step separates "the change isn't live" from "my browser is showing me an old copy", which are the two big families of this problem and have completely different fixes.

Quick check

1. You saved, but you didn't publish

Saving stores your work in the builder; publishing is what puts it in front of visitors. They're separate buttons on separate screens.

How to tell: open Publish in the black bar and look at the active snapshot's date and time. If it's older than your edit, your edit was never published.

Fix: press Publish website. See Saving, previewing and publishing.

2. Your browser is showing you an old copy

Browsers hold on to pages, stylesheets and images to make the web feel fast, and they're not always quick to notice you changed something.

How to tell: the change appears in a private window, or on your phone, but not in the browser window you've had open all afternoon.

Fix: a hard refresh. Ctrl + F5 on Windows, Cmd + Shift + R on a Mac. Do that on the page itself, not on the builder.

Your visitors are not usually in this situation. They didn't have your page open ten minutes ago, so they get the new version straight away.

3. You're not looking at the site you think you are

There are three addresses in play, and they can look identical:

Fix: use the website-name dropdown at the top right and pick Open live website, so you know for certain which one you're on.

If you've recently added a domain, its settings live in the account portal, not in the builder: open your website there and look at the Domains section. A domain only serves your site once its status says Live and it hasn't been turned off. Until then, or while its DNS still points at your old host, you'll be shown whatever that old host is serving. The free address your website came with keeps working the whole time, so use that to check your published site while a domain is still being set up.

4. You edited the other language

Every template and every page exists once per language, and they're edited separately. It's easy to change the Dutch home page and then check the English one.

How to tell: the language flag in the editor's toolbar, next to the name of what you're editing.

Fix: switch language and make the change again. See Templates and pages.

5. The thing you changed lives somewhere else

Two versions of the same mix-up:

• You edited the page, but the element belongs to the template. Headers, menus and footers normally sit in the template. Editing them on a page isn't possible (the left pane says so) and the change you thought you made was to something else.
• You edited the template, but this one page hides that element. An element from the template can be hidden on an individual page. If your change shows up everywhere except one page, that's the reason.

Fix: open the template rather than the page, or check the page for a hidden element. See Templates and pages.

6. You changed it for one screen size only

The screen-size buttons decide which version of a setting you're editing. A change made with the phone icon selected applies to phones and nothing else, so it's genuinely live, and genuinely invisible on your desktop.

How to tell: switch to all in the toolbar and look at the setting. If it's empty there, you set it somewhere further down.

The same applies to visibility: an element switched off for one screen size disappears at that width and stays put at every other. See Making your website work on phones.

Still nothing?

The page is members-only. A restricted page shows the "not logged in" page to anyone who isn't a member, including you, when you visit the live site in a private window.

An article isn't showing up. Publications have a few extra switches of their own: the article can be switched off, its publish window may not have started or may already have ended, it may sit in a category your overview element doesn't point at, or the overview may not have its Article page set. Check those before you suspect the publish.

Google still shows the old text. That's Google's copy of your page, not your page. It updates in its own time (days, sometimes a few weeks) and there's nothing to fix on your end.

Everything above checks out and it's still old. Publish once more. Publishing refreshes the cache for every domain linked to your website, and if one of them happened to be unreachable at that exact moment, a second publish sorts it. Left alone, that cache clears itself within about four hours anyway.