CMS Powered Pages Shouldn’t Break Builds

I’m a believer in returning something instead of nothing when it comes to content. Content may fail, but it should never bring down a page — and certainly never break a build. If it does, the right outcome is not a failed deploy, but a self serve way to debug invalid content while deploys continue without issue.

Too often, I’ve seen deployments blocked because of errors in Contentful. A missing slug, an undefined field in an API response, or a draft page that fails validation can prevent a site from building. The result? A 500 error for users and an incident for engineers — all because an editor saved a page in a perfectly normal “work in progress” state.

Content should never break a page. Pages should never break builds.

Imagine an editor publishing a time-sensitive blog post to accompany a major product launch. The post fails validation because of a missing FAQ entry. Instead of partially rendering and flagging the error, the whole build fails. The launch is delayed — not because of engineering, but because of a CMS hiccup.

A better approach is graceful degradation: If a page can’t render fully, render what’s valid. Capture and log the error. Alert the on-call team if engineering intervention is needed.

Users see something instead of a blank page or a crash. Editors can fix validation errors without blocking deployments. Engineers know when (and why) a real incident needs attention instead of debugging content.

Don’t let pages break builds.

Capture errors, alert responsibly, and fallback to valid content.