diff --git a/api/publish.ts b/api/publish.ts
index c04fd49..970f792 100644
--- a/api/publish.ts
+++ b/api/publish.ts
@@ -38,6 +38,25 @@ import { buildSite } from './static-site';
 
 /** The site's content. Parents before children, so the restore satisfies its own foreign keys. */
 const CONTENT_TABLES = [
+  /*
+    The page builder's own tables, and the reason they are FIRST.
+
+    Parents before children: a section belongs to a page and a component to a section. `galleries` sits
+    below them because a gallery block names a set by id — carried in JSON rather than as a foreign
+    key, so nothing enforces the order, which is exactly why it is written down.
+
+    They were missing until 2026-08-31, and the symptom was the whole point of this file: publish
+    copied every table it knew about, the build rendered production faithfully, and the home page came
+    out as the empty-page placeholder because production had the seeded layout and no content. Nothing
+    failed. The list is explicit so that a table added later is CONSIDERED — this is what it looks like
+    when one is not.
+  */
+  'pages',
+  'sections',
+  'components',
+  // The site's colours, faces and default gutter. A singleton, and production had no row at all —
+  // which reads as "the defaults" and is indistinguishable from a setting nobody has changed yet.
+  'site_layout',
   'home_content',
   'home_gallery_media',
   'about_content',