ISR's stale window cost them a launch

ISR's stale window cost them a launch

A gadget retailer used Next.js Incremental Static Regeneration with revalidate: 3600 on launch pages. They launched a flagship product at 9am. Google indexed a 'coming soon' placeholder and held it for hours. -100% on the launch keyword on day one — the day that mattered most.

The case turned on ISR's mechanics. Time-based revalidation serves the stale page until the window expires, then regenerates on the next request. With a 1-hour window and a pre-warmed cache from the night before, the 'coming soon' HTML stuck. Googlebot crawled the launch hard at 9:05 and got yesterday.

Turns out time-based ISR optimizes for steady-state, not events. The right tool was on-demand revalidation — fire revalidatePath() the instant the product flips live.

They wired the publish action to purge and pre-render. Next launch: indexed live in 14 minutes.

The relaunched page hit position 3 within 48 hours, +27% category traffic that quarter. ISR for stable pages, on-demand for moments. Knowing which clock you're on is the whole game.