When struggling to publish an item on Sitecore there are a number of tips that could help you to successfully publish your items.

1. Ensure that all elements of your page are published

All parts of your page need to be published in order to display correctly. This includes any folder you have created (both media library and content editor), media, datasource folder, components, pages and documentation.

2. Check for special characters

Special characters (dashes, ampersands, full stops etc.) can affect publishing. Ensure page names, folders, and the names of components do not contain any special characters. Item names should contain letters and numbers only. Special characters can be used in other sections of your page, such as the content editor, page/menu title, listing summary and SEO information.

3. Look out for duplicate names

If you have two parts of your page, or two pages, named identically it will confuse the publication process. Double check that your components, pages, documents and folders all have unique identifiers within their respective areas of the site.

4. Enable additional publishing views

Enabling extra workflow options can help you to quickly find items that you're having issues saving or publishing. Once added, icons will show the workflow state of your items and help indicate if for example they're still in draft state, require publishing, have validation issues or are locked by another user.

To enable, ensure you are in the content editor. In the content tree, hover over the left of the vertical grey line (this is called the Gutter), right click and ensure that the below options are enabled.

As you can see the below page is displaying a world cross icon/red icon that shows us there is an issue with the item.

To fix this problem, check your item to see if there are any missing mandatory fields and correct any issues. You can see in the image below that the page was missing the listing summary. Once the issues are resolved you should see an orange box icon.

What to do next if your item is still unpublished

If you have tried the above please contact us using the Slack support channel. You should check that you have the quick information option enabled on Sitecore prior to contacting us. It can help to quickly locate problem items. 

To enable the quick information section, go to content editor, red burger icon, application options and then enable 'quick info section'.

You can locate the quick info section at the top of the content area for each item (component, page, folder) on Sitecore. Please find the item ID and provide it to the support channel for investigation.

Alternatively, you can find the page ID from a live page. Open your page, right-click on the web page and select ‘view source’ from the context menu. Next, search for 'pageID' and then copy the page ID.