The difference between publish, start, and pause in Optimizely Experimentation

  • Updated
Relevant products:
  • Optimizely Web Experimentation
  • Optimizely Performance Edge

Throughout your experimentation, you will probably publish, start, and pause your experiments many times. This article explains the differences among these three actions and how they affect your experiment's status.

Publish

Publish saves and "stages" your experiment's changes. If you have not started the experiment or the experiment is paused, your changes will not be visible to visitors when you publish. A common use case for publishing changes to experiments that are not running is using Optimizely Experimentation's Experiment Scheduler to start your experiments.

If you publish changes to an experiment that is running (in other words, an experiment you have started but have not paused), visitors will see your changes immediately. Optimizely Experimentation does not recommend publishing changes to a running experiment.

Start

Start makes your experiment live to all visitors in your targeted audience and changes the experiment status to "Running."

Pause

Pause stops your experiment so new visitors will not see it and changes the experiment status to "Paused." No new visitors will see a paused experiment until you restart it.

You will use pause when you want to send all traffic to the winning variation or re-launch an experiment that is not working correctly or delivering a poor experience.