Connect

§ 01Editable by the firm, never rendered late

The firm edits its own pages in Payload, which runs inside the same Next.js app. Pages are prerendered from the database at build time, so a visitor never waits on the CMS.

§ 02What runs where

§ 03Five decisions, written down

1. 01
   One long-lived process, on purpose

   In-process cache invalidation breaks on serverless or across instances.

2. 02
   Migrations before the build

   The build prerenders from the database, so migrations stay additive and a destructive change ships in two releases.

3. 03
   Audit the image that ships

   The checks run against the exact Docker image that goes to the server.

4. 04
   Images over SSH, not a registry

   Lightsail has no instance role, so no IAM keys live on the server.

5. 05
   Fingerprint content around a deploy

   If content changed during the release, the cache is purged.

§ 04One command to release

§ 05Invalidating by tag

Payload hooks invalidate the cache by tag when content changes, so an edit shows on the next request. A daily rebuild is the backstop.

§ 06Built to be found

Every page is in the sitemap and has a Markdown twin. llms.txt and llms-full.txt give language models the whole site in one read. OG images are generated per page, and Ukrainian and English each have their own URLs. SEO scores 100 on 9 of 10 pages on mobile.