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Two different things have to be true before a reader sees a theme edit: the change must be published within the theme, and that theme must be the live one. Most reports of a missing change are one of those two, and they are easy to confuse because both are called publishing in ordinary speech.
Why is my theme change not showing?
- You saved a change and the live site looks the same.
- It appears in the preview and not on the site.
- It shows for you and not for a colleague.
One: the change was not published within the theme
Editing settings or code changes the working copy. Until you click Publish, it stays in the editor, which is also why the preview shows it and the site does not.
The preview is the working copy. The site is the published theme. That single distinction explains the second symptom above entirely.
Two: you edited a theme that is not live
Readers see the live theme, whichever one that is. Editing a copy while a different theme is live produces exactly this, and it is common precisely because copying before editing is the sensible habit.
Open Customize design and check which theme is marked live, then check it is the one you have been working in. A useful confirmation: you cannot delete the live theme, so if Delete is available on the theme you edited, it is not the live one.
Then decide which way to close the gap. Setting your edited copy live publishes everything else in it at the same time, so that is right when the copy is the version you want. Where it holds other unfinished work, carry the one change across to the live theme instead.
Three: your browser cached it
Stylesheets are cached aggressively. A hard refresh, or a private window, tells you whether the change is live and your browser is behind.
This is also why it shows for a colleague and not for you, or the reverse.
Four: another rule is winning
In a stylesheet, a more specific rule elsewhere can override yours. The browser's developer tools show which rule applies, which turns guessing into reading.
Five: you edited the wrong template
A theme has separate templates for different page types, and optional ones live in templates/article_pages, templates/category_pages, templates/section_pages and templates/custom_pages. A change to an article template does nothing on the home page.
Where a theme has several article templates, check which one the article you are looking at uses before concluding the edit did not work.
Check in a private window
Signed out and uncached. That is what a reader sees, and it separates the caching cause from the publishing ones in a few seconds.
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