December 13, 2025
Instant publishing for SSGs
Static Site Generators (SSGs) are awesome… but there is one issue nobody talks about: publishing takes forever! Some people have tackled this problem by creating previews. But I have created the first CMS for SSGs with ‘instant publishing’! Check it out!
On the left you see the editor and on the right you see the live website. Pressing the ‘publish’ button updates the website on the right within a second. Simple, but amazing, right?
My approach only works because I choose to use the fastest SSG in the world: Hugo. So publishing takes less than a second, instead of (multiple) minutes. I already bragged about this 3 years ago. However, my CMS never felt fast, because you had to navigate to the dashboard to press the publish button. Now that the publish button is directly below the editor, and you see the content updating in real time, it’s a completely different experience.
Another annoying thing about CMS systems is that it is often hard to find the content you want to edit. I fixed this by allowing you to navigate both on the left and the right part of the screen. I achieved this by making both parts listen to each other. So if you navigate in the editor on the left, it will update the page on the right. And more importantly… if you navigate on the right part (in your website), it will show the editor for that page on the left. Simple, but very effective… and it makes finding your content in the CMS a breeze.
The last problem with CMS systems is that they do not offer a way to check if your content actually works on small screen sizes. I have fixed this by making the split between the editor and the live website draggable. With a flick of the mouse you can check if your content looks okay on a 350px wide mobile screen. Again: simple, but powerful.
All in all some great improvements to an already great CMS. The ‘instant publishing’ editing mode is turned off by default, to honor the zero-config principle of the CMS. Do you want to experience what this new editing mode feels like? Contact me.
() Joost van der Schee