Incremental Static Regeneration
Generate static pages that update themselves with ISR, on-demand revalidation, and streaming strategies.
13 min readnextjs, isr, caching, static-generation, web-dev
Static sites are fast. Dynamic sites are fresh. Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) gives you both — pages that are pre-rendered at build time (or on first request) and automatically update in the background when data changes.
For content-heavy sites like blogs, e-commerce catalogs, or documentation, ISR is the sweet spot between "rebuild everything on every change" and "render everything on every request."
The Problem ISR Solves
Consider an e-commerce site with 10,000 product pages:
- Static generation (SSG): Build all 10,000 pages at deploy time. Fast to serve, but rebuilding takes 30 minutes. Price changes don't show up until the next deploy.
- Server-side rendering (SSR): Render each page on every request. Always fresh, but every page load hits the database. Slow unde
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