Be Suspicious of Your CMS’s Publishing

Are you taking your Content Management System’s word for it that content has been published?  Sooner or later it’s likely you’ll find that you’ve been lied to.  It’s always a good idea to check the actual page to ensure that the CMS has actually pushed the content, rather than relying on the CMS’s confirmation.

Publishing new or updated content on your website or social pages can often happen in a rush or on the fly.  In those instances, it’s tempting to hit publish and move on to the next task, especially when the CMS has marked the content as live.  Those situations are inevitably when your CMS will lie to you and you’ll have to circle back to correct content that has not published.

This problem can happen on any CMS platform because any platform can fail to move the new content through to the server or service that it’s hosted on. It can often be a delay or time out issue that prevents an update from publishing correctly. Obviously, more robust website CMS platforms run more of a risk of publishing failures because they have more functions that might fail. This risk is even higher on modular CMS templates where pages, segments, components, assets, or widgets all need to be published separately to make a unified whole.

The good news is that there is a simple solution that works on all platforms.  Check the page or post on your live site.  If you find that updates are not appearing, be sure to get the newest version of your page or post by holding down the shift key and refreshing your page (this makes sure you’re not loading an old version from your browser cache). Checking the live site rather than trusting the CMS’s confirmation, verifies the publishing process and the timing of the published content before using it in your digital marketing.