How to use Incremental Exports

What is needed: Simply Static Pro

About the Incremental Exports and when to use them

Incremental Exports offer an easy way to update your static site once you've done your initial full static export.

We track changes on your WordPress website and only update those changes on your static site, resulting in faster and more manageable updates for your static website.

Run an Incremental Export

Head over to Simply Static -> Generate within your WordPress admin area. Once there, you will notice a select menu right above the Generate Static Files button, where you can choose the export type.

Depending on your setup, you will be presented with three options:

  • Export
  • Update
  • Build (with a list of your existing builds

Choose Update and click on the Generate Static Files button to perform an incremental export that only pushes changes to your static site.

How it works behind the scenes

We track hash values representing the content of all your pages and compare them when running an incremental export.

This means we still need to fetch all the pages and files from your website to compare them, but we only perform follow-up tasks for the changed results.

Limitations of Incremental Exports

One thing to note is that incremental exports are not available for ZIP-based (ZIP and Tiiny.host) exports.

That's because we create an entirely new ZIP file each time you run an export, and there are no files to compare against.

Besides that, it works with all the other integrated deployment options like:

  • AWS S3
  • GitHub
  • BunnyCDN
  • SFTP
  • Local Directory

View the progress of your incremental export

Once you click the "Export static page," you can visit Simply Static > Settings > Activity Log to view the progress of your incremental export.

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