The difference between publish, start, and pause

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Throughout your experimentation process, you can publish, start, and pause your experiments many times.

Publish

Publish saves and stages your experiment's changes. If you have not started or have paused the experiment, visitors cannot see your changes 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 (an experiment you have started but have not paused), visitors see your changes immediately. Optimizely 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 and changes its status to Paused. No new visitors see a paused experiment until you restart it.

After pausing an experiment you can, Deploy a winning variation or Launch and monitor your experiment.