Before building out pages, it's important to understand how the deployment process works. Deployments are fully rendered versions of your site that can be published to staging or production.

As is standard in web development, Yext sites come with two environments:

• Staging — where you preview and QA your changes as you're developing new features or building the site
• Production — your site is live or ready to launch

You always want to test your changes in staging before pushing to production to catch any errors before your users do.

Note: Before publishing, ensure you've updated the Configuration Label for your backend configuration in the Experiences tab to the most recent version (i.e., the version you tested in staging).

The Pages Deployment Process

In Yext Search, it's important to know a few things about the Deploy process:

• When you commit your code or create your live preview, you kick off a Deploy via the Yext CI System.
• The deploy takes the information in your repository, injects additional data points like your business ID and API key, and makes your site ready for publishing by running through a post-processing toolchain.
• Deploys can take anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes (or more) depending on the complexity of the toolchain.
• The deployment process is broken out into three discrete phases: Initial Build, Initial Page Generation, and Ongoing Data Updates.

Managing Your Search Deploys

When you make a commit to Search, it is deployed. A new deploy section is created for every commit, maintaining the commit message you entered. How you manage deploys depends on which version of Pages you are using.

Pages

In addition to Live Preview links from the Code Editor, you have three types of links from your deploys: deploy previews, staging links, and a production link.

Deploy Preview Links

Each deploy has a deploy-specific preview link. Click the Preview button next to a deploy to open that version of your site. You can preview multiple deploys to compare work or share different versions with stakeholders.

Each site may have up to five active preview links at a time across all branches. If you want to share a preview link for a commit that no longer has one, click the dropdown for the relevant deploy and click Redeploy to generate a new preview link.

Staging and Production Links

At the top of the Deploys screen, you will see a Production and Staging link. These are permalinks that will always display the version of the site that is pushed to either environment. The current staged deploy is marked with an orange "Staging" indicator; the one pinned to production has a green "Production" indicator.

You can have a staging link for each branch (the branch name is prepended to the staging domain), but only one production link across the site, which must come from the production branch.

Best Practices

By default, your most recent deploy is pinned to staging. Production is not automatically updated — you must manually publish a deploy to production. Thoroughly QA your experience in staging before publishing to production.

Classic Pages (Legacy)

When you open a site on Classic Pages, you will see the Staging Environment and Production Environment toward the bottom of the screen.

In each environment, you will see Production and Staging links next to the URL section — permalinks that will always display the version of the site pushed to that environment.

Best Practices

For staging, you can set the Git Reference to the master branch to reflect changes happening in real time. However, never set the Git Reference to master in the production environment. When publishing to production, always use a commit tag that has been reviewed first.

How to Publish to Staging or Production

Pages

1. Click Pages in the navigation bar and click on your desired site.
2. Click Deploys.
3. Locate the deploy you want to publish.
4. Click the arrow next to the Preview button for that deploy to open a dropdown.
5. Select Publish to Production or Publish to Staging.

Note: By default, any new deploys are already published to staging. You must manually publish to production after thorough QA.

Classic Pages (Legacy)

1. Click Pages in the navigation bar and click on your desired site.
2. Click the View Environment button within either the Staging or Production Environment.
3. Click the New Publish button in the top right corner. A dialog box appears.
4. Select a Git Reference. Choose from one of the tags in the dropdown.
   • This is a tag assigned during the commit process or added afterward by clicking into a "recent commit" on a branch.
   • If publishing to Staging, you can assign this to the master branch.
   • Never assign to master when publishing to Production.
5. Click Continue.
6. View your staging or production environment by clicking on the links.