How does one switch from FTP uploading of changed pages to "publishing" Option?

I uploaded my website successfully via FTP. I’ve since made changes on a couple of pages in Sitely that I want to upload. If I switch from FTP to Sitely’s “Publishing” option in Settings, will Sitely try to upload my entire site again or just the pages that have changed? I know if you use “publish” to make changes after you upload it only uploads the pages that have changed, but I am unsure how it works if one is combining both methods.

Hi :wave:t2:

If I’m not mistaken, Sitely uploads the entire site during the first publication, then republishes all pages with each update, even those that haven’t been modified. However, images and videos, which usually make up the bulk of the site’s weight, are only uploaded once unless they have been changed.

Sitely handles this automatically, making it much easier than doing it manually :blush:

Does it “know” which pages have changed from the FTP upload if I switch from already having used FTP to the publishing button?

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Hi @brineflaker, if you manually upload after an export to disk, Sitely will not be able to use that upload. In version 2 we had a server side php that would return a sha1 hash of the file, to know that the file was the same, but in practice this didn’t work well so we reverted to upload time and file size as markers to identify a specific file content. However we need to know the exact upload time directly, there’s no process to “adopt” an existing upload. So it’s best to upload from Sitely consistently, to ensure the files are added/removed as needed.

So about publishing from Sitely directly, Sitely will avoid regenerating and uploading images and other large files, this is the bulk of the upload, however currently multiple pages are connected by a single css file (for efficiency and performance), so when updating one page, the others are connected and are republished. This is something we hope to improve but for now it will slow down publishing a site with very many pages, particularly on a slow Mac.

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Thank you, @duncan. I can’t get the publish button to work (just says something like “website was not published “), so if I stick with exporting to the hard drive and uploading changed files via FTP, if I make a text formatting change on just one page, will uploading just that file work or will it break something?

We should look into what the publishing issue is (email directly with a screenshot).

You can’t assume that dragging the individual html file over ftp will work. You should use the synchronization feature of an FTP app to synchronize the whole export folder with the server folder.

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