Create and manage pages

How to build and maintain the pages on your site in SGEN

Pages are what visitors land on and navigate to — your About page, Services, Contact, legal pages. Everything visitors see at a URL like /about or /contact lives here. This walkthrough covers the everyday flow — adding a new page, editing one, duplicating, trashing, and swapping which page appears at the root of your site — and flags the mistakes that will bite you.

What is this for?

The Pages screen is the list of every public page on your site. You will reach for it any time you want to add a new page, change an existing one, retire something you no longer need, or decide which page visitors see when they type your domain alone. Pages are distinct from blog posts (those live under Blog) and from menus (nav order lives under Appearance → Menu). If a visitor can land on a URL and read content, you probably manage it here.

Good use cases

Example 1: Landing page for a seasonal promotion (Acme Coffee Roasters Holiday Gift Guide).

Acme Coffee Roasters wants a page at acmecoffee.com/holiday-gift-guide-2026 for their November email campaign. Click Add New, choose Start from scratch, fill in Title = Holiday Gift Guide 2026 (Permalink auto-fills as holiday-gift-guide-2026), add content, tick Is landing page to strip the site header and footer so the page is purely the promotion, set Status = Publish, and click Create a Page. The page is live and header/footer-free — ready to link from the email blast.

You have a new site and want to publish a proper About page that lives at yoursite.com/about. Click Add New in the top-right. A modal opens asking how you want to start. Choose Start from scratch to get a blank form. Fill in Title = About, the Permalink auto-fills as about, add your content in the Content box, set Status = Publish in the right column, and click Create a Page. Your About page is live at yoursite.com/about seconds later.

To see the whole lifecycle at a glance — what visitors see when a page is Draft, Publish, or Trash — open yoursite.com/about in your browser after each change:

Once the page is Published, it's immediately reachable by anyone on the internet. Inbound links to /about now resolve to real content instead of a "Page Not Found" screen.

Example 2: Swap the homepage to a new About Us page.

Acme Coffee Roasters publishes a new "About Acme" page and wants it to replace their old "Home" at the site root. They publish "About Acme" first (Status = Publish). On the Pages list, they hover the "About Acme" row and click Set as Homepage, then confirm:

After confirming, the site root serves "About Acme" content. The old Home page stays live at /home. The save confirmation appears at the top of the page:

Example 2 (original): Change which page visitors see as your homepage.

You built a new landing page called "Spring 2026" and want visitors going to your bare domain (yoursite.com/) to land on it. Publish the new page first. On the Pages list, hover its row — you will see Set as Homepage in the inline actions. Click it and confirm the prompt:

The public site root now serves your new page's content. The previous homepage keeps its normal slug URL (e.g. it stays reachable at /home) and can be published, unpublished, or edited like any other page. To reverse, just Set-as-Homepage on whichever page you want to restore.

Example 3: Hidden draft for client review before going live.

Acme Coffee Roasters wants to show a "Brewing Guide 2026" page to a business partner before publishing it publicly. They create the page with Status = Draft. The partner reviews it using the admin preview link (?draft_preview=ID). When the review is complete, Ada Lovelace opens the Edit screen, changes Status from Draft to Publish, and clicks Update a Page. The page goes live at acmecoffee.com/brewing-guide-2026 immediately.

The Pages list after publishing shows the row with a Published badge and All (5) / Published (4) / Draft (0) tab counts:

Example 3 (original): Retire a page without breaking inbound links.

You are deleting an old /summer-sale-2024 page. Do not just trash it — inbound links from email campaigns, Google results, and partner sites will all hit a 404. Do both of these in order:

1. On Pages, hover the row and click Trash. The page moves to the Trash tab and stops being reachable on the public site.
2. Open Redirects and add a 301 rule from /summer-sale-2024 to /blog (or wherever the replacement content lives).

Now old inbound links land on real content, and the retired page is out of your list. If you change your mind, you can switch to the Trash tab and Restore the page — it comes back as a Draft:

What NOT to use this for

• Do not trash your Home page without a replacement. Setting a page as the homepage requires a page that is already Published. If you trash your only homepage before picking a replacement, the public root (/) has nothing to serve and visitors land on an error. Publish the replacement first, Set-as-Homepage to it, and only then trash the old one.
• Do not rely on the delete confirmation alone. Sometimes the UI says the page was deleted even when it was not. After you trash a page, reload the Pages list and switch to the Trash tab to confirm the page actually moved there. If it is still on the main list, click Trash again.
• Do not use Template = SG-Builder if you only need basic text. SG-Builder is a full visual page builder — it is the right tool for a rich landing page with sections, images, and buttons, but it is heavy for a page that is just headings and paragraphs. For text-only pages, leave Template on Text Editor.
• Do not set a DRAFT page as your homepage. The UI only offers Set-as-Homepage on Published rows — do not try to force it through URL manipulation or API calls. A Draft homepage means visitors going to / get a 404 because the page is not actually publishable.
• Do not trash pages without checking what links to them. Other pages, menu items, external bookmarks, and Google search results do not know your page is gone. Always pair a trash with a Redirect to preserve inbound traffic.

How this connects to other features

• Redirects — retire a page + add a 301 redirect to preserve inbound links. Pages tells you what exists; Redirects is where you forward old URLs.
• Menu (Appearance → Menu) — pages do not auto-appear in your site's nav. Add them manually after publishing.
• Media Library — any images you drop into a page's content or Thumbnail come from Media. Uploads happen through the Media picker built into the Edit form.
• SG-Builder — when you pick Template = SG-Builder on a page, click Edit with SG-Builder to launch the full visual editor. SG-Builder is documented separately.
• SEO — each page has its own SEO title, description, and canonical URL. Set these in the SEO card on the Edit screen. Your sitemap auto-includes every Published page.

Before you start

• You are signed in to SGEN as an admin with access to Pages.
• You know what the page's Title and URL slug should be.
• You have decided whether this page should be Published (visible to anyone) or saved as a Draft while you work on it.

Where to go

1. Open the left navigation.
2. Select Pages → All Pages. You land on /sg-admin/pages/.
3. Top-right: Add New to create. Hover any existing row to see View, Edit, Set as Homepage, Duplicate, Trash, Export (the exact mix depends on whether the row is Published, Draft, or in the Trash tab).

Steps to add a new page

1. Open the template picker

Click the primary Add New button top-right. A modal auto-opens asking how you want to start:

Start from scratch loads a blank form. Use a template loads an SGB template you built earlier (see the separate SG-Builder documentation). For a simple text page, pick Start from scratch.

2. Fill in Title, Slug, and Content

The left column of the form has the fields that show up on the public page:

• Title is the heading visitors see at the top of the page, and what shows in browser tabs and search results.
• Permalink is the URL path. It auto-fills from the Title — click the slug to edit if you want something shorter or cleaner.
• Content is the body text. Leave Template = Text Editor in the right column for simple content; it renders as plain HTML with a WYSIWYG interface.

Page Banner, Advanced (per-page Header/Footer scripts), and SEO are optional and expandable.

3. Set the status

In the right column, pick Publish if you want the page live now, or Draft if you are still working on it. Draft pages are NOT reachable from the public URL — only you can see them through the admin preview.

4. Save

Click Create a Page (bottom of the right column). You land back on the Edit screen for the newly-created page, with a success message.

Steps to edit an existing page

From the Pages list, hover a row and click Edit, or just click the title. You land on the same form described above, pre-filled with the current page's values. Change what you need and click Update a Page. Your changes go live immediately.

The trash workflow

Trashing a page is a soft delete — the row moves to the Trash tab, and the public URL stops working. You can reverse it any time with Restore. Permanent deletion happens only from the Trash tab via Delete Permanently. See the Trash tab view in Example 3 below.

Before you trash: if the page has inbound links, also add a 301 Redirect so visitors land on a live replacement URL. Pages trashed without a redirect become 404s the next time someone clicks an old link.

What success looks like

• Your new or edited page appears in the Pages list with the expected Title and Author.
• Opening its URL in a private/incognito window loads the page you published (or returns 404 for a Draft — which is correct).
• After setting a new homepage, the public root / serves your chosen page.
• After trashing, the row shows up on the Trash tab and the public URL returns 404.

What to do if it does not work

• The public URL still loads the old content. Your browser or an upstream CDN is caching. Try a private/incognito window or add ?cb=1 to the URL to bypass cache.
• The page you trashed is still visible on the list. Reload the Pages page and switch to the Trash tab. If the row did not move, click Trash again on the row. Rarely, the first click is a no-op — a reload + retry clears it.
• Set as Homepage does nothing / option not visible. Only Published pages can be the homepage. Check the row's status badge; flip the page to Publish first, then set it as homepage.
• I trashed my homepage by accident. Go to the Trash tab, click Restore. The page returns as a Draft. Flip it to Publish and Set-as-Homepage again.
• My duplicate is named "(Draft) About". Expected behavior — duplicates land as Drafts with "(Draft)" appended to the title, so they never accidentally go live before you finish editing. Rename and publish when ready.

Next step

• Add your new pages to the nav in Appearance → Menu so visitors can find them.
• Set up SEO per page in the SEO card on the Edit screen — title, description, and canonical URL for search results.
• Back up your pages via Export on each row action, or use the Import/Export tool for whole-site snapshots.
• Review your Redirects any time you trash or rename a page so inbound links keep working.