A practical guide to incremental revalidation

By Jordan Lee

Aug 11, 2026

Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) lets you serve pre-rendered pages while still updating them in the background when content changes.

How it works

1. A page is generated statically at build time
2. Visitors are served the cached version instantly
3. After the revalidation window, the next request triggers a fresh build
4. Subsequent visitors get the updated page

Choosing a revalidation window

For marketing pages, a few minutes is plenty. For a blog, you might revalidate on publish via a webhook instead.

Used well, ISR gives you the speed of static with the freshness of server rendering.