How Super works

How Super works

How Super works

Super takes your Notion pages and turns them in to a high performing, fast, SEO-optimized website. And this means Super works a bit differently to 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 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 load 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 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 about 10-15 seconds, you will likely see the new version of the page.

This delivers fast pages to maximise User Experience and SEO performance. Once you have regular traffic to your site the cache is kept up to date every 10-15 seconds.

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Updates not displaying on your site

There are only a few reasons why updates aren't showing on your site, use the sections below to understand and troubleshoot the issue.

Updating the CDN Cache

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

You can trigger a CDN cache update by visiting a page 5 seconds after the last page visit. This visit will get the previous content from the cache and in the background the CDN cache is updated ready for the next visit.

Here are the steps to update the CDN cache for a page:

  1. Visit your site page. The Content Delivery Network refreshes the page cache in the background.
  2. Refresh the page in your browser after about 10-15 seconds. You will likely see the new version of the page. If not, wait 10-15 seconds and repeat the refresh.

Updates still aren't showing

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. And even though at each step the timeout is 5 seconds, sometimes these 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 fifteen-second cache between Notion and Super, and our five-second Content Delivery Network cache, try refreshing the page and then wait 15 seconds, then refresh again. This usually gives the system enough time to check for new content, load it, rebuild the page, and publish it.

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Remember there are multiple levels of caching going on – Notion caches updates that get published to their API, Super caches updates to the CDN, and the CDN caches content, and finally, the browser caches the content.

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. Please note: If you've made recent changes in Notion or Super, you'll need to force refresh the browser twice 10-15 seconds apart. Once to trigger the CDN cache refresh, and a second time to retrieve the update content.

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How to hard / force refresh and clear your browser cache: In most browsers on PC and Mac, you can perform a simple action to force a hard refresh. Hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and click on the reload icon on your browser’s toolbar. For more specific instructions for your Operating system and browser, check out this page.

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.
  1. Make a change in Notion
  2. Refresh the site page in the browser
  3. Wait 15 seconds
  4. Refresh your page in the browser again
  5. 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.

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The expected total time from Notion content change to published content visible will be between 1-2 minutes. This is a by-product of the architectural decision to make Super incredibly high performance and scalable.

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 within a few hours, please contact our customer support team.

Troubleshooting and Tips

If updates are showing in the Super dashboard preview but not in the browser:

  • the browser cache needs clearing (Try hard refreshing your site)

If updates are not showing in the Super dashboard preview:

  • Notion has not delivered the updates to Super yet, wait a few minutes and press the refresh button at the top right of the Dashboard preview. Check the public Notion share URL in a private browser to make sure the content is available.

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