How to change your hours, prices, or photos on a static site

The honest objection to a static website is not the building. It’s the Tuesday six months later when your hours change, a price goes up, or a photo needs replacing, and there’s no “Edit” button. This guide is that Tuesday. Pick whichever of the three routes matches how your site was put online, and budget ten to fifteen minutes.

One idea makes all three routes make sense: your website is a folder of files. Editing the site means changing a file in that folder and sending the folder back to Cloudflare. That’s it. There’s no database, no plugin, nothing that can break because you didn’t log in for a while.

Which route is yours?

• You uploaded a folder or zip to Cloudflare when you went live → Route 1.
• Cloudflare publishes automatically from GitHub → Route 2.
• Either of the above, but you don’t want to open the code yourself → Route 3, which ends in Route 1 or 2 anyway.

Not sure? Open your Cloudflare dashboard, go to Workers & Pages, click your project. If the deployment history shows “Direct upload,” it’s Route 1. If it shows commit messages and a repository name, it’s Route 2.

Before any edit: find your copy of the files

You need the folder of files that was uploaded. Look for it where you built the site: your Downloads, a project folder, or the AI conversation you built it in. Route 2 users always have a copy on GitHub. Route 1 users who truly can’t find the folder can save each page from the live site with the browser’s Save page as (choose “Webpage, complete”), but the real fix is to keep the folder somewhere you’ll find it, and from now on you will.

Make a copy of the folder before you touch anything. Name it with today’s date. This is your undo.

Route 1: Edit the file and re-upload

1. Open the page you want to change (index.html for the home page, services.html or services/index.html for a services page) in any text editor. Notepad on Windows and TextEdit on Mac both work; TextEdit needs Format → Make Plain Text first. A free editor like Visual Studio Code is nicer because it colours the code.
2. Use Find (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) to jump to the exact text you’re changing — the old hours, the old price. Change only the words between the tags. If you see <p>Open 9–5</p>, the part you edit is Open 9–5.
3. Save the file.
4. Open the file in your browser by double-clicking it. Does the page look right? Is the new text there? If the layout broke, you deleted a < or > by accident: go back to your dated copy and try again.
5. In Cloudflare, open your project, click Create new deployment, and upload the whole folder again (or a fresh zip of it). Cloudflare replaces the live site with the new folder within a minute.

Swapping a photo: put the new image in the same folder as the old one, give it the exact same file name as the one it replaces, and upload. No code edit needed. If you want a different file name, you’ll also need to change the src="..." line in the page that shows it.

Route 2: Edit on GitHub in the browser

If Cloudflare deploys from GitHub, you never need to touch Cloudflare for an edit.

1. Sign in to GitHub and open your repository.
2. Click through to the page’s file and click the pencil icon (Edit this file).
3. Make the change, exactly as in Route 1 step 2.
4. Scroll down, write a one-line note in Commit changes (“Update Saturday hours”), and click Commit changes.
5. GitHub tells Cloudflare, Cloudflare rebuilds, and the change is live in a minute or two. Your project’s Cloudflare page shows the new deployment with your note next to it.

Every edit you ever make is recorded with its date and can be reversed with one click, which is a better undo than any builder offers.

Route 3: Ask an AI to make the edit

If reading HTML makes you nervous, don’t. Open the AI assistant you built the site with (or any of them) and paste in the whole file, then say precisely what should change:

Here is my services page. Change the price of a standard clean from the current one to the new one, change Saturday hours to 9 to 1, and don’t change anything else. Give me back the complete file.

Save what it gives you over the old file — after checking the page in your browser as in Route 1 step 4, and after reading the changed lines yourself. AI assistants occasionally “tidy up” things you didn’t ask about. The instruction don’t change anything else helps; comparing against your dated backup is the real safety net.

Then publish via Route 1 or Route 2.

Confirm the edit is actually live

This is the step people skip, then wonder why customers still see the old price.

1. Open your site in a private/incognito window, or on your phone with Wi‑Fi off. Your normal browser may show you the old cached page.
2. Use the browser’s Find to search for the new text. If it isn’t there, wait a minute and reload; if it still isn’t, check the Cloudflare deployment list to see whether the upload finished.
3. Click through every link on the page you changed. A broken layout usually shows up as text in the wrong place or a missing footer.

If something went wrong

Cloudflare keeps every previous deployment. In your project, find the last one that worked and choose Rollback to this deployment. The live site returns to that version instantly, and you can figure out the mistake with no pressure. That single feature is why “what if I break it” is not a reason to pay a monthly fee.

When this stops being the right answer

If you’re doing this weekly, if two people need to edit, or if the edits are more than words and photos, the calculation changes. The builder decision guide is honest about when a visual editor earns its subscription, and a maintenance arrangement can be legitimate when it’s buying real work. For twice-a-year hours and prices, though, you now know all you need.

Keep recovery usable

Use the backup register and restore exercise to record what the copy includes, where protected access instructions live, and whether a sample restores successfully. A copy inside the same inaccessible account may not survive that account’s loss. Keep recovery instructions outside the affected device and preserve required records before cancelling a service.