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How to manually control content publishing
How to manually control content publishing

Manually controlling when your content is published is sometimes critical in ensuring the consistency and integrity of your website.

Charlene Abranilla avatar
Written by Charlene Abranilla
Updated over a week ago

Normally, Super works automatically to sync your content from Notion to your website. But in some cases, you might need more control over when content is synced to your live site.

Super’s Manual Publishing feature allows you to control when your content is published to your server, but still allows you to preview the current Notion content in the Dashboard preview. This allows you to write, produce, organize and style the content and pages in the Dashboard, and then publish when you are ready.

Overview of the Manual Publishing process

Work in the Dashboard normally.

Manual publishing only affects the live site. Content will continue to sync through to the Dashboard preview, so you can style it.

Publish content to the live site.

When you are ready to publish your content, press the Publish updates button. This will publish your content and code updates to the live site on your custom domain.

💡Note that publishing a whole site can take more time than just letting content changes sync through dynamically.

When we manually publish a site, every page is rebuilt to ensure the latest content and code it published to the live site. Small sites can be published in minutes, while sites with over 200 pages may take an hour. Larger sites might take overnight.

What is different when Manual Publishing is turned on?

When Manual Publishing is turned on, your Super Dashboard will continue to work as it always has and will preview the current Notion content and customizations. Any changes to the content in Notion and customizations (like code and SEO settings) will not be published to the live site on the connected domain.

What happens when Manual Publishing is turned back off?

If you turn Manual Publishing off after it has been on, then the live site on the connected domain will start requesting updates from Notion and Super and the site will start updating again.

How to manually sync and publish content

1. Activate Manual Publishing

Manual Publishing is a paid feature of the Pro Tier, and the site must be upgraded to this tier in order for it to be activated.

You also need to connect a custom domain in order for manual publish to work—manual publishing does not function on a super.site domain.

Upgrade to the Pro Tier

In the Super Dashboard, navigate to your site Dashboard, go to Site and click Manual Publishing.

You will be prompted to upgrade to the Pro Tier if you have not already done so. The Pro Tier works like the Personal paid tier in that it is on a site by site basis. Only the site you upgrade is charged at the Pro Tier rate.

2. Connect a custom domain

To add a domain to your site, head into your site editor (⚙️ icon) and click into the Domains page, then click the Add a custom domain button.

3. Enable Manual Publishing

Once you have upgraded to the Pro Tier and connected your custom domain, you can enable Manual Publishing by turning on the Manual Publishing toggle. When enabled the live site is only updated when you press the Publish updates button.

4. Work in the Dashboard normally

Notion content changes will flow through to the Super dashboard automatically as you view different pages in the dashboard. Changes to custom code will apply in real time to the dashboard preview.

When Manual publishing is enabled, none of the updates from Notion or the changes that you make in the Super Dashboard will be published to the site on the connected domain.

You can also manually refresh a page by pressing the Dashboard refresh button. This will send a request to see if there is new content in Notion and rebuild the page if required.

If you would like to see a non-dashboard preview of the site, use the default super.site domain for your site. Only the custom domain will not receive the updates.

5. Publish content to the live site

Publishing process is controlled by you. When you are ready to publish your updates to the live site on the custom domain, simply press the Publish updates button.

When you push the Publish updates button, Super will begin queuing the request to the Server. This involves clearing the CDN cache so that the updates are available to site visitors.

After the changes are in the queue, the publishing status will change to publish pending. When the site has been rebuilt, the Last Published time will be updated. If no changes needed to be published, then the time will remain at the last time changes were actually published to the site.


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