Static website builder platform Gatsby today announced the capability for static-website owners to complete what the company calls “incremental builds” so they can deploy changes to their websites in less than 10 seconds in many situations.

When the World Wide Web started, most websites were static. That means the code for the webpage, usually written entirely in hypertext markup language, was not generated by software and existed as files on a server to be called up when a browser visited the website.

Soon, dynamic website solutions became popular with platforms such as WordPress, which would render websites on the fly from a database. However, static web pages still retain the absolute speed of being able to send a file immediately, without the need to wait for the page to be constructed from a database. The tradeoff happens where static pages send quickly, but they must be updated – otherwise, they can become out of date with changing information.

The upshot is that dynamic web pages always have the most current up-to-date information but can slow down with massive traffic, while static webpages are faster but it’s harder to keep information up-to-date.

“If you’ve used Gatsby, or any other static site generator for that matter, you already know that as sites get larger, build times tend to increase,” said Gatsby Chief Executive Kyle Mathews. “This can be annoying if your site has 1,000 pages and one content editor, but it becomes maybe just straight-up impossible if you have, say, 100,000 pages and a dozen content contributors constantly triggering new builds.”

That’s because if the underlying data that creates the web pages changes, every web page affected by that change must be updated to reflect it. As the number of contributors and pages scales up, the time it takes to update all of them can increase exponentially, which can quickly become an untenable situation.

To solve that problem, Gatsby developed a system that allows for rapid updates to thousands of web pages in parallel. It uses cloud-based technology that changes only the pages that need to be modified and attempts to modify only the portions that need changing.

This ability is now implemented into the platform and is available in beta on Gatsby Cloud, a cloud-based suite of tools for small business and enterprise users.

According to Mathews, with this new solution, build speeds can happen in less than 10 seconds for even giant, highly distributed websites, delivering a 1,000-fold improvement over existing build processes that require an entire site to be updated for even the smallest data change.

As a result, marketers and editors can be assured that when they update content, the changes will become available in almost real time. That means media publishers, social networks and e-commerce sites with thousands of pages can have multiple collaborators updating and editing content and see their changes almost instantly, which means that users will have a seamless experience when things are changing rapidly.

Brian Webster, founder and director of development for Los Angeles-based digital agency Delicious Simplicity, called the concept of incremental builds with Gatsby “transformative.”

“There used to be a trade-off in discussing Gatsby with clients,” Webster said. “We always wanted to use Gatsby for the great developer experience and ahead-of-time compilation, but build time was prohibitive for some of our clients — those whose sites were hundreds of thousands of pages, or who needed their changes up immediately. Before Incremental Builds, we used to wait for some sites up to 20 minutes for our builds to finish. Now we publish the data change and builds are live in 10 seconds.”

The incremental builds capability is now in beta for users of the Gatsby Cloud and new users can try it out for free for two weeks. After that, it can remain free for personal projects and single sites. Professional and business users who need to deploy websites at scale can pay $99 per month for 3,000 real-time edits every month or $249 per month for 9,000 real-time edits every month. Custom enterprise-level packages are also available on request.

Image: Gatsby