How Super syncs with Notion

Super takes your Notion pages and turns them into a high-performing, fast, SEO-optimized website. And this means Super works a bit differently from Notion and other website builders.

Super and Notion workflow

In a nutshell, you manage your content in Notion, and manage your site in Super.

Notion

Notion is where the content for your site lives and is the place you spend most of your time when creating your site. You use Notion to:

• Manage your content
• Update text, images and other media
• Create site pages
• Create your site layout and structure.

But what is Notion?

Notion is a powerful all-in-one app used to create documents, manage projects, organise content, and so much more. Are you new to Notion? Visit their official getting started guide to learn more.

Super

Super works behind the scenes to turn your pages into a static webpage that is fast and high performance but still stays in sync with Notion. You use Super to:

• Deliver super fast web experience to your users
• Customize the appearance of your site
• Add a domain to your website
• Manage your site SEO settings
• Manage your site pages

How Super sites sync and update

Super creates a static version of your Notion page and caches it to deliver it super fast to your users and search engines.

In creating the static page, we manage the demand on Notion, and we cache the static page in our Content Delivery Network. Also, the browser caches pages too.

Here's what's going on behind the scenes:

1. Super sites are designed to stay up to date automatically and on demand, which means that page updates are triggered by site visits.
2. When you visit a site page, the Content Delivery Network refreshes the page cache in the background.
3. When you refresh the page in your browser after the cache expires, you will likely see the new version of the page.

The cache time for auto-sync varies based on your plan.

Here’s what it means:

• Free Plan (24 hours): Auto-sync updates will occur once every 24 hours, triggered by site visits. Your content will be refreshed once a day when someone visits your page.
• Personal Plan (4 hours): On the Personal plan, auto-sync will update your pages every four hours, triggered by site visits. This ensures content is refreshed multiple times throughout the day.
• Pro Plan (1 minute): For Pro plan users, auto-sync will occur after one minute, triggered by site visits. This provides frequent updates for active sites.

This delivers fast pages to maximise User Experience and SEO performance. Once you have regular traffic to your site, the page is updated automatically.

The fastest way to update/sync content and pages in Super

The fastest and best way to update page content in Super while you are building and testing your site is to use the dashboard refresh button in the top right above the site preview.

Pressing the Dashboard refresh button will read the latest published content from your Notion page, rebuild the page in Super and clear the cache for that page. If you click on the page URL at the top of the preview window you should see the updated published page, and if not, a simple refresh of the browser will load the updated page.

Hovering over this dashboard refresh button will show you the last edited time from the Notion page so you can see if Super is getting the latest content from Notion.

Updating pages by visiting the page

Super uses a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to optimize the delivery of content to your users so sites are scalable and fast. The CDN Cache is updated on demand when someone visits your site (this means that once your site is receiving regular traffic it will automatically stay up to date.

Super will automatically update pages and sync content from Notion based on traffic visits. And you can use a site visit to trigger an update. You will need to use a force refresh of your browser to bypass the browser cache when you do this. Remember when refreshing this way you will still need to wait for the CDN Cache to expire.

If you have a very quiet site, you may need to trigger the CDN update manually using the dashboard refresh button).

Updates not displaying on your site

In some circumstances, the automatic refreshes of these caches can mean that it seems like your site is not updating, but the cache refresh is just going through its cycle. Sometimes these cache times become cumulative and add up to a seemingly long time period. Pressing the refresh button more often does not make the cache expire any faster.

Given the 10 second cache between Notion and Super, and our 60 second Content Delivery Network cache, try refreshing the page and then wait 60 seconds, then refresh again. if the content is still not there, wait for 15 seconds and try again. This usually gives the system enough time to check for new content, load it, rebuild the page, and publish it.

Troubleshooting and Tips

Clearing the browser cache

When you are developing your site, it can be exciting to see the changes live in the browser. But sometimes when you visit your site in the browser, you might notice the page has not updated. This is because modern browsers cache your sites content (keep a copy of it) to make it load faster.

In order to clear the cache and view the latest updates directly from Super, you'll need to force refresh your browser.

How to get consistent updates on your site

We use Super for all our sites too, and our staff have their own Super sites. The best way to check if updates have been made on your site is to use the site preview via the Super Dashboard. If updates are showing here, then you can be confident that the updates will show on the live site once the cache cycle has completed.

Our ways of developing our sites making sure that sites display updates smoothly and frequently is using one of the following methods:

1. Make a change in Notion
2. Head into your Site preview in the site editor via the Super dashboard and refresh the page (top right refresh button).
3. The page should update.

If changes aren't appearing in the dashboard or the page after the above refreshes, please wait for 10-15 seconds before repeating.

Create confidently

Even if changes are not being displayed to your website right away, you can continue to manage content in Notion confidently knowing that your site changes will be displayed eventually. In the rare occasion where your site has not updated, please contact our customer support team.