Website content plays a crucial role in attracting your target audience to your website and later on converting that audience into loyal customers. One of the best ways to do so is to use a content management system that not only works for developers, but also for editors and designers.

Webflow CMS is one of such platforms that allows you to do so with ease. It controls the structure of your content and its design throughout the project without letting you touch a single line of code. 

Even though the Webflow CMS is packed with cutting-edge features that allow you to work smoothly, Webflow CMS publishing errors are something that makes things complicated.

When working with Webflow CMS automation, one has an option to update live items. This works well as long as you’re not making frequent changes from the Webflow Designer. But things start becoming complicated with the frequent updates, mainly the Webflow site publishing errors. You will mainly the following errors.

1. Inconsistent Publications Error
2. The collection structure changed since the last publish

‍You might be wondering: What causes these errors? What does it have to do with frequent changes? and how to avoid such errors?

Well, here are some conditions that result in these errors:

1. You made changes to the Webflow site, but the site has not been published after.

In other words, you cannot update Webflow CMS items live if your site contains unpublished data.

2. If you are using a custom domain with Webflow, and you have not published to both Webflow.io and the custom domain you will receive an “Inconsistent Publications Error” which means the site is published to multiple domains at the same time.

Let's dig deeper and go through some of the use cases to find the real reason behind these errors.

Common Use Cases that resulted in these errors

Byteline provides a Smart Update feature to easily create & update Webflow CMS items. It lets you pick matching fields and the platform does the heavy lifting of figuring out whether to create or update items. 

You can even delete CMS items that have been deleted from your source data. It works by mapping Byteline expressions or variables to the Webflow CMS fields. The concept behind the same is that as the source data is not directly tied to the specific integration like Airtable or others alike, you get the flexibility to use any source data to update Webflow CMS.

Here are the three use-cases that have run into Webflow publishing errors when users are also actively changing their Webflow Sites.

1. Airtable to Webflow CMS Sync

In this use case, Airtable is treated as the source of truth. The data that has to be shown on a Webflow site is synced to the Webflow CMS.

2. RSS feed to Webflow CMS

This flow is created using RSS trigger and Webflow CMS update nodes. Data from the RSS feed is synced to Webflow CMS. This also offers the flexibility of checking RSS feed changes as frequently as required.

3. Byteline Web Scraper to Webflow CMS

Byteline comes with a powerful built-in Web Scraper along with its chrome extension that allows you to configure the scraper in no time. The good thing about the web scraper task node is that it can be easily added to any flow like any other Byteline task node. This allows users to scrape data to a number of cloud services with Webflow CMS.

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In this use case, Webflow CMS fields are mapped to Byteline expressions that are in turn mapped from the Web Scraper output fields.

How to resolve Webflow CMS publishing errors?

When it comes to resolving these Webflow CMS publishing errors, one of the most effective ways is to implement Webflow CMS update in the non-live mode, followed by automatically publishing the site. Byteline Webflow CMS update task provides a simple checkbox that allows the configuration of updates in the non-live mode.

Now you might be wondering about updating the live site. Aren’t you?

Well, the Webflow CMS updates will not be available on your site unless you publish. For that, Byteline offers a Webflow publish task that you can use in the following ways:

Publishing in the same flow: You can easily design your flow to publish the Webflow site after every update. All you need to do is to use Webflow - Publish Site task node after the Webflow - Update Items task node.

Creating another flow to publish frequently: One of the best options for automations that update the Webflow CMS items through multiple flows is to publish the site on a scheduled basis. The same applies to automations that update frequently. All you need to do is to create a new Byteline flow with a scheduled trigger to publish the site. You can easily configure the schedule to run based on the frequency you want to publish - be it every night or a couple of hours.

Final Takeaway

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know much about coding, you can still create, organize and update your website with ease using Webflow CMS. Webflow CMS offers you the ability to do so without getting involved in the coding. But one of the issues you have to deal with is Webflow CMS publishing errors. Publishing errors generally arise under some circumstances. But they can be prevented easily by using Byteline with the above mentioned tricks and tips.