The main navigation of your website is build by the order of the first level pages. Now, you want to change the order. To achieve that you change the order of the item in the Sites Console and publish the reordered item.
Let's take the WKND example. Here the initial main navigation is: MAGAZINE | ADVENTURES | FAQs | ABOUT US. Now, we want to have ABOUT US entry at very first item, so we move position of the corresponding about-us document before magazine document and publish the about-us document. Pls see screenshots.
Current/Experienced Behavior:
The changed order is not present on the publisher, instead you still get the old order in the main navigation.To get this working you need to publish whole website content which is basically not possible in daily work as you have always some prepared pages (status = modified) which should not go online yet and of course you don't want to overwrite the publication timestamp of all your pages just because you have change the order of ONE item! That's just not applicable.
Improved/Expected Behavior:
The behavior is different in On-Prem with AEM 6.5.16.0. Here it works like expected: to bring the changed order to publisher, you just need to publish the reordered page itself, nothing more!
Environment Details (AEM version/service pack, any other specifics if applicable):
This has been reported to the engineering under the internal reference SITES-17529. The product team will triage this request to verify feasibility based on the prioritization model. This post will be updated according to the Jira request status.