Publishing & Deploys

Ship your site, manage versions, and go live on a custom domain.

When you're ready to make your site public, Ploy handles publishing, hosting, SSL, and CDN delivery. Every publish creates a versioned deploy you can roll back to at any time.

How Publishing Works

  1. Build — When you click Publish (or ask Ploy's Agent to publish), Ploy builds your site into optimized static assets.
  2. Deploy — The build is deployed to Ploy's global hosting infrastructure.
  3. Live — Your site is immediately available at its Ploy URL (and your custom domain, if configured).

Every deploy is a snapshot — a complete, immutable version of your site at that point in time.

Typical deploy time: A few seconds for most sites.

Automatic Publishing

Give Ploy standing permission to publish site changes without asking you to click Publish each time. Automatic publishing is configured per site and is off by default for existing sites.

Configure automatic publishing

  1. Open the site dashboard and go to Advanced.
  2. Turn on Automatic publishing.
  3. Choose the publishing scope you want to allow.
  • Preview only Recommended — Ploy can publish preview deployments automatically. Publishing to production still requires your confirmation.
  • Preview + Production — Ploy can publish preview deployments and your live site without an additional confirmation. Use this option only when you are comfortable giving Ploy that level of publishing autonomy.

You can turn automatic publishing off at any time from Advanced. Changing the scope for production uses Ploy's existing confirmation step-up flow.

Site Advanced settings showing Automatic publishing enabled, Preview only selected as the recommended scope, and Preview + Production with a warning.
Automatic publishing is configured per site in Advanced. Preview only is the recommended scope; Preview + Production can publish to your live site without confirmation.

What to expect

  • Automatic publishing is limited to the targets allowed by the scope you selected. If a change needs a higher permission level, Ploy falls back to the regular manual Publish flow.
  • While a publish is running, the status card shows the state of each target. Use the gear icon on the card to review or edit the permission in Advanced.
  • Only one publish operation can run at a time. If another publish is already in progress, wait for it to finish before retrying.

Review a staging-only page

For a page that needs review before it goes live:

  1. Use a test path such as /test/slug.
  2. Add a noindex directive so search engines do not index the page.
  3. Publish to Preview only, then share the preview URL for review.

Preview publishing is separate from production publishing. You do not need to publish to production to review the page, and a preview-only publish does not update the live site.

Managing Deploys

Viewing Deploy History

Open your site dashboard and navigate to Deploys. You'll see a list of every publish, with:

  • Timestamp
  • What changed (commit message)
  • Status (live, previous, or failed)

Rolling Back

To revert to an earlier version:

  1. Open Deploys in the site dashboard.
  2. Find the version you want to restore.
  3. Click Promote to make it the live deploy.

Rollbacks are instant — the previous version is already built and cached. There's no rebuild step.

Tip: You can also ask Ploy's Agent — "Roll back to the previous deploy" or "Promote the version from yesterday."

Custom Domains

By default, your site is available on a Ploy-hosted URL. To use your own domain:

  1. Go to Sites, select your site, then open Dashboard then Hosting.
  2. You will need to upgrade your Plan to enable Custom Domains
  3. Click Add Domain and enter your domain.
  4. Click an existing Domain card to manage its Routing Rules
  5. Follow the setup flow — automatic (one-click via Entri) or manual DNS configuration.
  6. Ploy verifies DNS and provisions an SSL certificate automatically.

After you add the records at your registrar, come back to Sites → Settings → Hosting to finish the setup. DNS changes can take a while to propagate, so it is normal for a domain not to go live immediately. If you would like a hand with any of this, email support@ploy.ai.

Tip: If you are unsure about the status of your domain, open a new Ploy conversation and ask. Ploy can retrieve the current status, and if something is configured incorrectly, it can give you the instructions to fix it.

For detailed instructions covering Cloudflare, Route 53, GoDaddy, Namecheap, Porkbun, and other registrars, see the full Custom Domain Setup guide.

SSL Certificates

Ploy automatically provisions and renews SSL certificates for every custom domain. No configuration needed — certificates are issued via ACME challenge as soon as your DNS records verify.

Your site is always served over HTTPS.

Going Live Checklist

Before sharing your site publicly, run through this checklist:

  • Preview on desktop and mobile — Make sure the design looks good at all breakpoints.
  • Check all links — Verify internal and external links work correctly.
  • Review SEO basics — Page titles, meta descriptions, and Open Graph tags are set for key pages.
  • Test page speed — Ask Ploy's Agent to run a Lighthouse audit.
  • Set up analytics — Confirm your built-in analytics are tracking (they are by default), and connect GA4/GSC if desired.
  • Configure your domain — Add a custom domain and verify SSL is active.
  • Publish — Hit publish and verify the live site loads correctly.

What's Next?