You’ve edited your website’s files and want to publish them to the web. Doing this is a two-step process.

First, you’ll commit those changes to your local repository. Then you push those same changes to the remote repository, which is hosted on GitHub’s servers. GitHub detects those changes and refreshes your website.

Commit to your local repository

Go to GitHub Desktop. The app should reflect the changes you’ve made that differ from what’s in your local repository. Click through the files in the sidebar to confirm the changes you want to commit are correct.

Enter a note about the changes. It’s more useful to say why you’re making the change instead of what the change is. If you’re making a change to one file, GitHub Desktop will automatically fill in the summary. Otherwise, it will require you to enter a summary.

Commit the changes to your local repository by clicking Commit to main.

Push all of the changes to the internet

When you’re committed all of the changes locally and ready to see those changes live on your website, you will need to push your commits to GitHub. You are pushing your changes to the remote repository. GitHub will automatically detect those changes, and refresh your site.

• In GitHub Desktop, click Push origin.
• Give GitHub about 2 minutes before trying to reload the website.

Fine print: Limitations

GitHub has some usage limits:

• You can’t publish your changes more than 10 times per hour.
• Published sites can be no larger than 1 GB. This could affect your site if you have a lot of images.
• GitHub does not like storing files larger than 50 MB. This mostly likely affects videos. Consider putting the video up on a service like Vimeo or YouTube. Then we can embed the video in your site.