Publishing is the final step in the content creation process and is what pushes your content on the web server(s). Without publishing, you will not be able to preview your content on a live web page.
The Publish action is available for:
You can publish these assets to two destinations, Production and Staging. The Production destination is a web server that delivers what is often called the "live site." The Staging destination is a web server used to test your content before publishing to a production server.
It is our suggested best practice to Publish first to the Staging destination. Once you have reviewed your content on the Staging server, you can then Publish to the Production server.