The static dilemma
Static pages are fast and cheap, but they go stale because they are built once. Rebuilding the whole site for every content change does not scale to thousands of pages.
Regenerate on a schedule
Incremental static regeneration lets a static page rebuild itself after a chosen time without a full redeploy. Each page carries a revalidate window.
- The first request after the window serves the existing cached page instantly.
- In the background the server rebuilds that one page.
- The next visitor gets the fresh version.
This is a stale while revalidate pattern: users never wait for a rebuild, and freshness lags by at most the revalidate window.
On demand revalidation
You can also trigger a rebuild explicitly when data changes, for example from a content webhook, so updates appear without waiting for the timer.
Key idea
Incremental static regeneration serves cached HTML immediately and rebuilds single pages in the background, blending static speed with bounded freshness.