Deactivate and activate build functions

Dear all,

We are contacting you after having our website updated by a developer who used Netlify to host our frontend. We are a literary agency, and our website is mainly a display of the books we represent (purely text and a few covers, no more than 200 books). After putting our previously Word-press and EX2 hosted website in the hands of our developer, we found ourselves with a fragmented website, working through three platforms, Wordpress, Github and Netflify, making it very complicated for us to make any modifications and giving us a small space for autonomy.
Having only 300 minutes of free ‘build’, we find ourselves in a difficult position: we have indeed observed that every time we make a change in our texts on WordPress, even if we only change a coma – which is often necessary given our literary bias, the whole website is impacted and the free minutes fly away (it takes 10 minutes for every build).

Is it possible for us to make changes without having the whole website ‘rebuilt’ every time ? That is, we would like to be able to operate changes on the entire website and when we have finished updating it to be able to save all the contents at once, by activating the builds towards Netlify. The idea behind is that all adjustments are taken into account at once.

We saw that we can ‘stop builds’ but would that be enough ? And in order to save the changes we make into our website (ex WordPress content), do we need to ‘re-activate the builds’ ? And thus, will the modifications made in our texts on Wordpress be all updated and taken into account at once, helping us optimize our time of ‘builds’ ?

I hope I made myself clear. We are trying to understand how to work with this new website which we were handed in without any explanations, nor had we been informed that our website would be fragmented.

I’d advise to test locally if that’s possible. If you can still contact the developer, you can ask them how you can preview the website locally. Then you can compare and make final publish decisions.

However, if a local preview is not possible, yes, you can stop builds. You can then continue to make changes in WordPress without worrying about build minutes. After you resume your builds, you’d have to make another change in WordPress to ‘trigger’ a new build. If not that, you can always trigger a build manually from the deploys section. Once this build finishes, all your changes would go live.

Hello, @Agence_litt :wave:

I just wanted to follow up here to see if you have been able to follow @hrishikesh 's advice here. Are you still experiencing obstacles or questions?

Let us know!

Dear Hilary,

thank you so much for your e-mail, and thank you @hrishikesh. I did not have the time to check if the deactivate/activate build function works with a save function on Wordpress. As soon as we look into it, we will surely get back to you and keep you updated.

Your reactivity and follow-up is impressive, thank you !

Cristina

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Hello Cristina,

Thanks you! We will keep an eye out for a response should you have future questions or concerns. :slight_smile:

Dear Hrishikesh and Hilary,

A short line to say a big thank you for your precious advice, we have indeed stopped / resumed builds on Netlify and this give us a lot more time to make all the changes on our website. As you mentioned, we cannot preview locally, would you have any tips on how to do that on WP?

Thank you again,

Cristina

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WordPress won’t let you preview locally, but the static site generator that your developer might have used should have the option. It might need a little setup, but that would be one-time.

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Thank you so much Hrishikesh. We have tried to update our site today, so we stopped builds, worked on WP, but before we got back to resume builds, the site wasn’t working anymore. On domain management it says we should check dns configuration, I am sending you a screenshot down below. Any idea how we can fix that?

Thank you so much for your help. I feel this is getting too complicated for me and I am wasting too much time. Is it the activate/deactivate builds which might have triggered this?

Thanks so much for your help, Cristina

No, it doesn’t affect this in any way.

Chances are, you’re affected by the recent Netlify error incident, as reported here: https://www.netlifystatus.com/

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Hey there, @Agence_litt ,

Echoing what @hrishikesh said here, you might be impacted by this outage. Our status page is where you can get the most up to date information.

We have an ongoing thread about this, as well as an interim support guide to assist you!

Thanks for your patience.

Thank you Hilary and @hrishikesh. Does it imply that I need to make changes myself on my netlify account? Or that the situation will be fixed by netlify and things will go back to normal?

Cristina

It’ll be fixed on Netlify’s end. Once the incident is resolved, check once and let us know if it’s not fixed.

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Great guys, this is very helpful. Is this kind of issue frequent on Netlify ? I’ve only been using it since two weeks.

Thank you,

Cristina

You can see a history of outages on our Status Page. If you have any additional questions about the outage, please post them in this thread! This will help other Forums folks who are wondering similar things.