Editor and website
Your website
Where readers find your articles, with a default design, a custom site your agent builds, or a site you host yourself.
Your articles, pages, and subscribe form live on a website at your paragraph.com address. Readers can browse, subscribe, and share from it, and on a paid plan, search engines can find it too.
Website settings
Everything lives in Settings → Website. The first card says where readers go right now. Below it, two tabs hold the two options:
- Paragraph website. Paragraph hosts your site, with either the default design or a custom design your agent built. The Use your custom design switch chooses between them, and the Custom domain card sets its address.
- Your own website. Paragraph sends readers to a site you host. See Use your own website.
Build a custom site
Choose Create new… in the sidebar, then Website, or ask in chat.
Tell your agent what you want. It offers themes to start from, or you can start from scratch.
Your agent builds the site with your real articles and pages. Ask for changes in plain English: layout, colors, type, new pages.
When you're happy, tell your agent to publish, and follow the deploy status in Settings → Website.
If you've set a visual brand, your site uses its colors and fonts. Your agent never deploys changes without your go-ahead. To rework the site safely, turn off Use your custom design to show the default design in the meantime. Switching designs never touches your articles or subscribers.
Use your own domain
On a paid plan, you can put your site on a domain you own, like blog.example.com. See Custom domains.
Use your own website
If you already show your articles on a site you host (built with the Paragraph API or any other way), Paragraph can send readers there. Your paragraph.com address redirects each article to its page on your site, and your home and archive to your site's blog page.
This is included on every paid plan. You can use a custom domain or your own website, not both.
To set it up, choose the Your own website tab. Enter your website address and a post address using {slug} or {id}, like https://example.com/blog/{slug}. Then add the TXT record Paragraph shows at your DNS provider and choose Check again. For an article that doesn't follow the pattern, set its canonical URL to its page on your site (with or without www.). If that page doesn't load, Paragraph tries the post address instead.
Readers see the Paragraph copy until your page is up. Links in your newsletters, test sends included, go to the article's page on your site once that page is live, even for an article you only send by email. Your subscribe page and RSS feed stay on Paragraph. To stop, choose the Paragraph website tab, then Switch to Paragraph website.
SEO
Every Paragraph site ships with structured data. Paid plans add sitemaps, an llms.txt file, and a Markdown copy of each article (add .md to its address), so search engines and AI assistants can find, read, and cite your work. None of it needs configuring.
Search engines index your paragraph.com pages once your workspace is on a paid plan. On Free, you can still publish, share links, and send newsletters, but your paragraph.com pages ask search engines not to index them, stay out of Paragraph's sitemaps, and have no llms.txt or Markdown copies. Older publications that built a readership here before this changed keep all of it on any plan.
For each article, Review & publish sets the title, description, and post URL that appear in search results. If an article first appeared elsewhere, set that original address as its Canonical URL. Paragraph uses it in search metadata, keeps the Paragraph link working, and leaves the article out of your sitemap. With your own website, a canonical URL on your site is also where the paragraph.com link redirects.
The Search & AI tab in Analytics shows visits from search engines and AI assistants.