Getting the most out of the editor

Most people use about a third of what the editor can do. They change the words, swap a few pictures, and stop — not because they're incurious, but because nobody told them the rest was there, and because moving things on a website has historically been the sort of change that broke something.

It doesn't here. This is a tour of what the editor actually does, roughly in the order you'll want it, from the obvious to the things that genuinely change how you work.

Everything happens on the page

The first thing to internalise: you are not filling in a form that generates a website somewhere else. You're looking at the real page, rendered by the same code that will serve your visitors, with your real content in it. Click a headline and type over it. Click a paragraph and rewrite it. What you see is literally what publishes.

That's worth trusting, because it changes how you work. There's no round-trip of edit, save, preview, squint, go back. You make the change and you're already looking at the result.

Text

Click into any headline, paragraph, button label or caption and type. No dialog, no field to hunt for in a sidebar — the text is where the text is.

Images

Click an image to replace it. Upload straight from your camera or phone; the platform converts it to a modern web format and resizes it on the way in, so you don't need to prepare anything first. (Our photography guide covers what to feed it.)

Links and buttons

Every button and link can point at another page on your site, chosen from a picker rather than typed as a URL. That matters more than it sounds: links chosen this way don't rot when you rename a page.

Sections: the part people don't touch

Your pages are built from sections — a hero, a feature row, a gallery, a testimonial block, a booking form, a product grid. You can move them, add them, duplicate them and delete them, and none of it can break your site.

Drag to reorder

Grab a section and move it up or down until the page reads the way you'd say it out loud. This is the single most underused control in the editor and the one that most changes how a page performs. The order the template shipped in is a suggestion based on a business that isn't yours.

A useful exercise: read your home page aloud, top to bottom, as if explaining your business to someone across a table. Wherever you find yourself wanting to say something earlier, move that section up.

Add what you need

New sections come from a menu, grouped by type so you're browsing categories rather than scrolling a flat list of names. Anything you add reads your real data — a locations section shows your actual locations, a featured-products section shows real stock and prices, a testimonials section shows your published reviews.

Duplicate what works

Got a section styled the way you like? Duplicate it rather than building a second one from scratch. It arrives with your settings intact and you just change the content.

Delete without guilt

This is the advice we give most often and it's the hardest to take. Templates ship full of sections to demonstrate what's possible. Every one you keep but can't fill honestly makes the page worse. A short page of true things outperforms a long page of filler, every time.

The best edit most home pages need is a deletion.

Recolouring the whole site at once

Your brand colours live in one place, not on each page. Set your accent, your background and your text colour once and every page updates together — buttons, links, headings, highlights, section backgrounds. Your newsletters and campaigns pick up the same palette, so an email that lands in someone's inbox looks like it came from the same business as the website.

If you built with the AI builder you'll already have three palettes suggested for your business, and you can preview each one live across the whole site before applying it. If you'd rather choose yourself, you can — and you can change your mind next month without editing a single page by hand.

Individual sections also have their own background swatches, drawn from your palette rather than a free-for-all colour picker. That's deliberate: it lets you alternate light and dark bands down a page for rhythm without ever ending up with a shade that clashes with the rest of your site. There's more on why that works in our design principles guide.

Type is already handled

Every template ships with a heading font and a body font chosen to work together. Unless you have a strong reason and a good eye, leave them. Type pairing is the fastest way to make a professional site look amateur, and the pairing you have was made by someone who does this for a living.

Drafts, previews and publishing

Nothing you do in the editor is live until you publish. The editor autosaves a draft as you work, so you can build across several evenings, close the laptop mid-sentence, and come back to exactly where you were — while your published site carries on serving visitors the last version you approved.

When it's ready, publish. It's one click, and it's just as easy to come back and change something tomorrow.

Sandbox versions: the professional habit

This is the feature that most changes how confident people are about editing, and almost nobody discovers it on their own.

A version is a private copy of your whole site. You make one, then experiment in it as freely as you like — restructure the home page, try a completely different template, build a seasonal look — while your live site carries on untouched, with its own domain, orders, bookings and customers.

When you're happy, you apply the version back and it becomes your live site. If you're not, you delete it and nothing happened.

Use it for anything you'd otherwise be nervous about: a big rewrite, a holiday layout you'll want to undo in January, a redesign you want to sit with for a week, or simply a snapshot before a large edit. Starter plans include two versions at a time and Store plans five.

The settings worth an afternoon

A few things live outside the page editor and repay the time.

• Per-page SEO. Every page gets its own title and description. Write them as search results, not slogans — see our SEO guide.
• Share images. Set one, and links to your site look deliberate wherever they're posted instead of pulling a random image.
• Your logo height. A small control with an outsized effect — particularly on phones, where a wide wordmark set too large will crowd the menu.
• Legal pages. Generate your privacy policy and publish your terms. Twenty minutes, once.
• Reusable content pages. Anything that isn't a designed landing page — a policy, an FAQ, a long explainer — can be a content page and dropped into your navigation.

Asking for changes in plain English

If you started with the AI builder, it doesn't stop after the first draft. You can come back and say what you want changed — “shorten the intro”, “add a services section”, “make this warmer” — preview the result, then keep it or undo it.

It's most useful for the jobs where knowing what you want is easy and doing it is tedious: tightening copy that runs long, drafting a section you're staring blankly at, changing the tone of a page you wrote in a hurry. Everything it produces is ordinary editable content afterwards, so you're never handing over control — just skipping the blank page.

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Consider this permission

The most common thing we hear from someone six months into a site is that they didn't know they could move that. So: you can move that. You can delete it. You can recolour everything, try a different template in a sandbox, and put it all back if you don't like it.

Open the editor this week and change one thing you've been quietly unhappy with. That's usually all it takes — the second change is much easier than the first.