Your website
Every publication gets a website, with a default design or a custom site your agent builds for you.
Publishing on Paragraph gives you a real website, not just a feed. It includes your posts, your pages, and an archive of every newsletter you've sent. Readers can browse, subscribe, and share from it, and search engines can find it. See SEO and site maintenance for what's built in.
You have two options for how it looks:
- A Paragraph website. The default design. Clean, fast, and ready the moment you publish.
- A custom site. A site your agent designs, builds, and deploys just for you.
Website settings
Everything lives in Settings → Website, where you choose what readers see on your publication URL.
The main control is the Use a Paragraph website toggle. When on, readers see the new Paragraph website instead of your classic blog. If you've been on Paragraph a while, this is how you move from the classic design to the new one.
Once you have a custom site deployed, a second toggle appears: Use custom website. It switches readers between your custom site and the default design. Turning it off doesn't delete anything, your custom site stays saved and you can switch back any time.
The same page shows your public URL and the status of your site, including your custom site's build and deploy state, so you can see when it's active.
Build a custom site
Ask your agent to build your website in chat. A typical flow:
Tell your agent what you want ("Build me a website" is enough to start). It offers a set of themes to start from, or you can start from scratch.
Your agent builds the site using your real posts and pages, and shows you its progress. Ask for changes in plain English: layout, colors, typography, new pages, anything.
When you're happy, tell your agent to publish. It deploys the site, and you can watch the status (build, deploy, active) in Settings → Website.
Your agent never publishes website changes on its own. Deploys wait for your explicit go-ahead, like every other public action (see Approvals).
Change your site later
Your website isn't one-and-done:
- Restyle it. Ask your agent to adjust anything, from a single page to the whole look.
- Switch themes. Your agent can rebuild on a new theme. This replaces the current site's customizations (your posts and subscribers are untouched), so it confirms with you first.
- Fall back safely. Turn off Use custom website to show the default design while you rework your custom site.
Your posts, pages, and subscribers live in your publication, not in any one design. Switching designs or themes never touches your content or your list.
Use your own domain
By default your site lives at your paragraph.com address. On Starter and above, you can point your own domain at it instead. See Custom domains.