Potion fetches content from your Notion pages and caches it on its CDN. When visitors come to your site, the pages they see come from that cached content. This means your pages will load much faster and your site won’t be affected by the limits Notion imposes on its API.

It also means changes made to your Notion content need to be synced before they appear on your Potion site.

Draft and Archived pages

You may have pages that aren’t quite ready to publish on your site. You may also have pages you no longer want to show up on your site but you’re not ready to completely delete them from Notion. Potion makes handling both situations pretty easy.

When you create a site from a Notion Wiki, Potion adds a potion:status property on your pages. Setting that property to Draft or Archived tells the Potion sync engine to ignore those pages. They will not appear on your site and they won’t get a URL. It’s as if those pages didn’t exist in Notion.

Once you’re ready to put that content on your site, simply remove that tag from the potion:status property and Potion will create a page for it on the next sync.

Pausing sync while making changes

When you’re making changes to a page, you probably don’t want visitors on your site to see those changes as you’re making them. Along with the Draft and Archived tags, you can also set the potion:status property to Sync Paused.

When a page’s status is set to Sync Paused, Potion will keep the content cached on the last sync and continue serving that to site visitors. Unlike Draft and Archived, the page still exists on your site. It’s just that Potion won’t update it’s content until you remove that Sync Paused status.

Pausing sync on a wiki home page

As you may have noticed, the home page of a Notion Wiki doesn’t have properties like other pages in the Wiki. Because that potion:status property doesn’t exist on that page, you can’t set it to Sync Paused before making changes.

As a workaround, Potion supports a potion:status:pause command to be inserted in the content of the page. Once changes are ready to be published, either remove that command or set it to potion:status:live. See Settings & Commands for more details.

Exception for video and audio blocks

If you use video or audio blocks with files uploaded to Notion (as opposed to external links), Potion doesn’t cache those files. Web pages with audio and video blocks will link to the original source file you uploaded on Notion.

One complicated aspect of this is Notion exposes those files through URLs that expire an hour after they’ve been fetched from the Notion API. To make sure visitors can still play your audio and video clips beyond the expiration of that link, Potion will automatically fetch a new URL from the Notion API when needed. Since we must go to the source, this bypasses the sync pause setting you may have set on the page.

Long story short, be careful when you update or delete audio or video files on Notion pages connected to a Potion webpage, visitors will eventually get the updated media regardless of the status you set on your page.