Strattic redesigns its static publishing workflow to make it more user-friendly

Static and headless WordPress. In one click.

We’re excited to announce the new and improved (I always thought that phrase was an oxymoron but it really does its job here!) version of Strattic’s all-important “Strattic Publish” button. The Strattic Publish button is what our users click in the WP admin to generate the static headless version of their site. Yes, it’s that easy.

At Strattic, we are always working to make this easy process even easier, and wanted to dramatically improve our UI to make publishing the static version of your site more intuitive and user friendly.

While going through the UI planning process, we worked on how to best communicate the multitude of publishing options that we offer:

Publishing environments

  • Preview Publish: Strattic users get a “preview” version of their static site which you can publish to in order to test any major changes you may have made to your site.
  • Live Publish: The live static site is the public-facing site which is available at your custom domain.

Types of publish

  • Full publish: Publishes your entire site – needed for when you update something that would affect every single page on your site, such as adding a menu item.
  • Quick publish: Only publishes new or edited posts or pages (and all related categories or tags) – perfect for new blog posts or for updating the site with a few new or edited pages. Learn more about quick publish.
  • Selective publish: Lets users select individual pages to publish – super handy when you need to fix a typo, or want to get a new landing page up on the site super fast.

In addition to the primary publishing options mentioned above, there are additional options to make publishing faster which can be found in the Strattic settings area. Learn more about speeding up the publishing process.

And…drumroll please for the big reveal 🥁… here are the before and after makeovers. Not as glamorous as celebrity makeovers, but hey, celebrity dashboards! They’re just like us!

Strattic Publish BEFORE

Problems with the old UI:

  • Strattic Publish doesn’t clearly state that it is a publish to the live static site
  • No easy to access “Quick Publish” option
  • No link to the other Strattic settings that are useful for configuring your publishing
  • Takes up a lot of room in the WordPress Admin bar

Strattic Publish AFTER

Benefits of the new UI:

  • Clear distinction and easy toggle between your Preview and Live environments
  • Easy access Quick Publish option 
  • Other types of publishes (i.e. selective publish) will be easily added to the dropdown menu down the road 
  • A link to the Publish Options page, which then links to more publish optimization settings
  • Takes up less room in the WP Admin bar

Strattic Publish page BEFORE

Problems with the old UI:

  • Too many options on one page
  • Quick Publish option didn’t save your choice for next time, so to use Quick Publish again you would have to click through to this page, select the Quick Publish option and then click Publish. That’s a lot of clickety-clicking.
  • Kinda oogly and meh – not very inspiring. So much grey!

Strattic Publish Page AFTER

Benefits of the new UI:

  • Cleaner layout with easy toggle for selecting the Preview or Live static environment 
  • Focus on publishing to the Live site since that is the primary action
  • Clearer explanations of publish environments and publish types
  • So pretty!

We’d love to hear what you think! Feel free to contact us to share your feedback about using the new publishing interface.