---
title: The difference between publish, start, and pause
slug: performance-edge/docs
docTags: 
createdAt: 2026-08-05T21:01:08.783Z
---

- Optimizely Web Experimentation
- Optimizely Performance Edge
- Optimizely Personalization

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](docId\:Os9GuxCJ2jzzFxdSQXrkv) 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](docId\:IsU8ejnD3mrkAia2mtIOA).

## 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](docId:09D9FnRH4rae4dt7wuSk1) or [Launch and monitor your experiment](docId:78hNXeqJmlJ-WMffjADBW).