Why isn't my site live?

Work down this list. The first three account for nearly everything.

1. It’s your first site, and it’s waiting for review

By far the most common reason. Every new account’s first publish is held for a person to look at, and until that happens the site does not serve.

The reason it doesn’t feel like an explanation is that nothing looks wrong: the upload succeeded, the site is on your dashboard, and there is no error anywhere. It is switched off, not broken. See Publish your first site.

Nothing to do but wait. It happens once per account, ever.

2. It’s private

A private site returns 404 to everyone including you, at its own address, even signed in. Use the preview on the site’s page to see it, or change it to link-only. See Sharing and visibility.

3. There’s no index.html at the top level

If your bundle has no index.html in its root, the site is created and published successfully and then returns 404, because there is no page to serve at the address.

This trips people who upload a folder that contains another folder — the index.html ends up one level down, where it doesn’t count. The dashboard warns about this before and after publishing; the warning is the thing to read.

Fix it by sending a bundle whose index.html sits at the very top.

4. You switched it off

Check the site’s page. If it is switched off, switch it back on — the files are still there.

5. You’re over a limit

If a publish was rejected rather than held, it will say so, with the reason. The usual causes are the site being too large, having too many files, or the account being at its site limit.

6. It was banned

If a site was taken down for abuse, it returns 451 rather than 404, and you cannot switch it back on or delete it. That is not something to retry.

A note on what “held” tells you

A site can be held for routine first-publish review, or because something about it was flagged. These look identical, deliberately — the dashboard says the same thing in both cases and gives no hint which one you are in.

So a held site is not evidence that anything is wrong with your content, and it is also not proof that nothing is. If a hold lasts longer than you’d expect, get in touch rather than republishing, which won’t help.