Publish your booking site (and your domain)

A YStay booking site is your own shop window: your pages, your theme, a booking engine that takes payment directly. An address comes with it — your-slug.ystay.site — and the site works from the moment you publish, even without a domain name of your own.

A page is made of blocks: hero banner, photo gallery, description, amenities, rates, booking widget, reviews, location (the address you entered and a “Directions” link), FAQ, contact. The booking block is not a picture of a calendar: it reads the same availability as the listing's own booking page. A night sold elsewhere disappears from the site on the next page load.

The path, screen by screen

1. Open My sites

   The side menu says My site; the page it opens is titled My sites and reads “Create and manage your direct booking sites.” While you have none, it shows “No site yet” and a Create a site button. Every site you create then appears as a card: its .ystay.site address, a Live or Draft badge, then Open editor and a Settings and domain icon.

   

2. Create the site

   The New site dialog asks for three things: the Site name, the Site type — Single property (“A site dedicated to one listing.”) or Multiple properties (“A showcase site listing several listings.”) — and, in the first case only, the Listing it covers. Create the site drops you straight into the editor.

   

3. Choose a template

   A brand-new site has no template yet, so the Choose a template gallery opens on its own, offering six ready-made art directions. Choose applies one and moves your content into it. You can come back through the Templates button in the top bar — applying a template to a site that already has content replaces that content, and the screen asks for a second click to confirm.

   

4. Edit in Studio

   Editing happens directly on the rendered page: you click into a heading, into a paragraph, and you type. There is no save button — the Saving… then Saved indicator tracks what reaches the server. But saved does not mean published: your changes stay in the draft.

   Buttons on the rendered page are edited the same way. For the hero banner's button, click its text, type, then press Enter: the default text is “Check availability” (it follows the page language), and it comes back if you empty the field. The button is only published with a destination. As long as the page has neither a booking block linked to a listing nor an attached listing, or the attached listing is not published, it shows greyed out in Studio, with the help text “Button hidden online: no destination”, and the published site does not show it. The call-to-action banner's button — the full-width banner that invites visitors to book — and the guidebook's button follow the same principle; the latter only appears online with a web address (http or https) entered.

   The address of the Location block is edited in place too: while its field is empty, it shows the hint “Add the property address”. That hint and the buttons' help text are only visible in the editor: the Preview mode in the top bar hides them, and the published site never shows them.

   The top bar gathers several controls — notably the Desktop / Mobile switch, the Preview mode, the Templates button, a status badge (Draft while nothing is live, Live followed by the version number afterwards, Unpublished changes when your draft has moved ahead) and, on the far right, Publish. It carries others depending on the site: scan it rather than rely on this list alone.

   A Constructor Agent panel is docked to the left of the rendering: it offers to build your site from your real data and shows your AI credits counter. One click on Collapse folds it away, and the rendering becomes fully visible again.

   

5. Set the name, the address and the languages

   Three tabs — Content, Theme and Settings — link the editor, the theme and the Site settings page. Under Site identity: the Site name, the Tagline, the Address (slug) — just below the field, the full address is spelled out, ending in .ystay.site — then the contact details.

   A slug already in use is refused on the spot: “This slug is already taken or reserved.” Further down, Site languages ticks “Languages offered to visitors of the public site.”

   

6. Dress the site

   The Theme tab opens Site theme, in two panes: Gallery, where Apply installs a ready-made theme in one go, then Customization for colours, typography, corner radius, logo and favicon. Your listings' photos and texts are not edited here: the site pulls them from the listing each block is bound to.

   What the site never makes up. The rating badge in the hero banner only shows with a real rating and at least one review, and the counter reads “12 reviews”. The cancellation badge is the one from your listing; the “Superhost” and “Replies in < 1 h” badges are no longer shown. The note “No service fees” only appears on a quote without service fees: cleaning and the tourist tax are not service fees. The booking block can carry an optional text — up to 2,000 characters, typed in the editor field that reads “Add some text (optional)” — and, left empty, it shows no paragraph on the site. Finally, the template's reassurance list only carries real facts: the pre-filled flexible-cancellation item is gone.

   It does not make up its buttons, its menu or its location either:

   • The hero banner's button carries your label and leads to the page's booking block if that block is linked to a listing, otherwise to the booking page of the listing attached to the page; with neither, it is not shown. The booking button in the navigation bar follows the same rule: no button is left without a destination.
   • The site menu, on a site that only has its home page, lists the sections actually shown, in page order: “Listings” as of two properties, “Photos”, “Reviews” and “Contact” — the last one leads to the footer when the page has no Contact section but the footer carries an e-mail address or a phone number. On a site with several pages, it lists the pages. The Studio menu, computed from the enabled blocks, can show more entries: only the published site is authoritative.
   • Amenities: beyond ten, the site shows ten, then the “Show all {n} amenities” button unfolds the full list and “Hide” folds it back.
   • The location shows the address you entered — it is public — and a “Directions” link that opens Google Maps in a new tab. No map is loaded on the site and no coordinates are used. Without an address, the section does not appear.
   • The browser tab reads “{page} — {site}” (on the home page, the site name alone), with no mention of YStay.

7. Connect your own domain

   Still under Settings, the Domain card reminds you that “Your site is included on a YStay subdomain. You can also connect your own domain name.” Two shortcuts take you straight there, without going back through the Settings tab: the Domain button in the Studio bar, and the Settings and domain icon on a site card in My sites. That subdomain sits at the top with an Included badge; it cannot be deleted.

   The Add a custom domain field expects a domain you already own — “A domain you own, e.g. bookings.my-domain.com.” — then Add. YStay then shows “DNS setup required” and asks you to “Create these two records at your domain registrar:” a TXT on _ystay-verify.your-domain.com, carrying the verification token, and a CNAME on the domain itself. The table has three columns — Type, Host, Value — and every cell copies with one click: carry over the value shown on screen, never one retyped from memory.

   

8. Get the domain verified

   Once both records are in place, Verify again starts the check. It is not instant: YStay goes back in the background and refreshes the badges. The first one tracks DNS — DNS pending, DNS verified or DNS failed — the second one the certificate: HTTPS not active, Certificate in progress, HTTPS active or Certificate error. Once the domain is verified, the DNS instructions disappear and Set as primary shows up: “Canonical (SEO) URLs of the published site will use this domain.”

9. Publish

   Publishing is an explicit act: the Publish button in the Studio bar freezes a numbered snapshot of the site. Later edits go back into the draft until the next publication, and every publication creates a new version. The success banner names the version and the date, and offers View published site. If nothing has changed since last time, the button reads Nothing to publish and stays disabled.

   Display fixes made by YStay — the hero banner's button, the menu, amenities, the location, the tab title — apply to sites already online, without republishing. Changes that touch your own data — the reassurance list, the text of the booking block, a button's label, the location's address — wait for your next publication: YStay never republishes on your behalf.

   One anchor changes meaning: #contact now designates the Contact section, no longer the footer, which now carries #pied-de-page; #contact-block no longer works, and a link already shared with that anchor opens the page at the top.

   

If publishing is refused

• “Publishing blocked: required content is missing”. The dialog lists what is missing — photo, description or address — on your published listings, not on the site. Keep editing sends you back to fix it, Publish anyway goes through.
• “Connect your payments (Stripe) to publish a site with online booking.” A visible page carries an active booking block while your payments are not open: enable them, or switch the block off and publish a purely showcase site.
• The button reads “Nothing to publish”. The live version already matches your draft; change something and it becomes clickable again.
• “DNS failed”. The domain row adds Failed: followed by the reason returned. Check both records at your registrar, then run Verify again.
• “Custom domains are not yet enabled in this environment.” The Add a custom domain field can refuse the addition with this message — the feature is not open yet on the environment you are using. This is not yours to unblock: contact support.
• “DNS verified” with “Certificate error”, or with “HTTPS not active” right after clicking Verify again. Certificate error also shows Failed: followed by the reason; HTTPS not active, on the other hand, shows nothing more — it is a brief in-between state while the check restarts, and the screen keeps refreshing on its own meanwhile. Verify again stays available in both cases.
• “Certificate in progress” badge with a reason starting with “Verification requested by hosting”. The host requires one more DNS record, on top of YStay's TXT and CNAME: the exact type, name and value are in the message. Add it at your registrar — the check resumes on its own, no need to click Verify again.
• “The domain could not be removed from hosting right now. Try again in a few minutes.” The same message shows for deleting a single domain or a whole site. Hosting has not yet confirmed the domain was released: try again a few minutes later, without touching your DNS. A domain that was never verified is always deleted immediately.
• The “Live · outside Studio” badge. The site is public but was put online before Studio: publishing replaces what is being served today.
• The public sees a closed page while your badge says “Live”. A site can be withdrawn by the platform: that withdrawal closes the public page without unpublishing the site, so your Studio badge may keep showing Live. In that case, contact support.
• The hero banner's button does not appear on the published site. It has no destination: the page has neither a booking block linked to a listing nor an attached listing, or the attached listing is not published — in Studio it then shows greyed out, with “Button hidden online: no destination”. Link a listing to the page, add a booking block linked to a listing, or publish the attached listing, then publish the site again. On a Multiple properties site, the “Voir les logements” button (the text written when the site is created) has no destination yet: it stays hidden online as long as the page has neither an attached listing nor a booking block linked to a listing.
• The “Directions” link does not appear. No address is entered in the Location block: without an address, the whole section is missing from the published site. Click the “Add the property address” field in Studio, type the address, then publish again.

Already have a site elsewhere?

The Embed on my site card, at the bottom of Site settings, is a separate route: it generates an <iframe> to paste into an existing site (WordPress, Wix, Squarespace…) so it shows the booking page of a published listing. No YStay site is needed, and the link points to a page that is already public.

Turning these features off

The account holder can turn off, separately, for the whole account from the AI features page (My account page), Drafting of the booking sites and Translation of the booking sites. Without sending anything more to the AI provider: the Constructor Agent panel keeps building your site from your real data, just without AI-written text, and you keep translating your blocks by hand under Settings › Site translations. The area concerned shows “This AI feature is turned off for your account.” and, for the account holder, the Turn back on in AI features link. Details: AI features: turning them on and off.

Next

• Enable payments (Stripe) — the condition for publishing a page that takes bookings.
• Take your first reservation — what happens once the site is live.
• Listings — fill in photos, descriptions and address, exactly what the publishing guard looks at.
• Connect your distribution channels — the platforms that come on top of your direct bookings.
• Translate and distribute the listing — the languages your site will present the listing in.