GitHub Pages not updating after a push

You pushed. Nothing changed on the live site. Here's what's actually happening.

This is almost always caused by a failed Actions workflow — not by your code being wrong. The push went through fine. The deploy is what broke.

Here's what I'd check first

Go to your repo on GitHub → click the Actions tab. Look at the most recent run. If it has a red X, the deploy never happened — the old version is still live.

Click the failed run → expand the step with the red X → read the actual error. It'll be obvious once you see it. 90% of the time it's one of these:

• Build script errored out (set -e caught something)
• File not found during the copy step
• Artifact too large (over ~900MB)
• Wrong branch — Pages is set to deploy from gh-pages but you pushed to main

The CNAME problem specifically

If your custom domain suddenly 404s after a push, your CNAME file isn't making it into _site/. The build wipes and recreates that folder — if you don't explicitly copy CNAME in, it disappears every deploy.

[ -f CNAME ] && cp CNAME _site/CNAME

Add that to your build script, push again, watch the Actions run go green.

Browser cache trick

Before assuming the deploy failed, open an incognito window and check the site there. Chrome and Safari aggressively cache static sites. What looks like "not updating" is often just your browser serving a 10-minute-old copy.