A small stylesheet tweak can be worth committing immediately even if the rest of the redesign needs another afternoon. When every commit deploys, it’s hard to save progress without also publishing it.

Give builds and releases different triggers

A push to a source branch can run the export and check that key pages and assets exist. The result tells you whether the project is ready to ship. A separate release action can publish when the whole set of changes is ready.

For a static site, the release record can be as simple as the source commit and the generated output it produced. If a problem appears later, that gives you a starting point for comparison. It also helps distinguish a successful publish to Git from a successful rollout at the hosting provider.

GitHub Actions supports starting a release workflow manually with workflow_dispatch. That gives a solo maintainer a straightforward way to choose when to go live. GitHub workflow run documentation