Publishing

Publishing clears the cache, to push through changes, but lack of publishing doesn't do the opposite.. changes can get through mainly to product pages and blogs, because stock availability and pricing needs to be live and real time as possible. 

Also...

Some pages are made live immediately when you press save within the CMS, and these do not require publishing. Always live pages include products, gallery photos, faq item pages, password protected pages, forums, events, blogs, and a few miscellaneous dynamic pages.