Field Kit · reference card
Static Site Launch-Readiness Check
A static site’s riskiest failures don’t announce themselves. Six checks to make each invisible seam visible on the deployed URL — before you point a domain at it.
The six checks
Run every one against the deployed URL on a cold cache — not your local preview. “Passes locally” is a weaker claim than it feels.
Open the live page with the network tab and confirm nothing loads at runtime from a third party you didn’t intend — art, fonts, scripts, data. Self-host or cache what you can at build time, so the page owes nothing to anyone else’s uptime.
Canonical, sitemap, feed, and og: URLs should resolve to the URL that’s actually serving the page. On a launchpad host, that’s a known seam — write it down and track it until the real domain is wired, instead of forgetting it.
Lists, counts, feeds, and sitemaps are generated from a source of truth. Regenerate and diff them; don’t eyeball it. A page can look authoritative while it’s quietly out of sync with the data behind it.
Every form or action is wired to a real endpoint — or it says plainly that it isn’t. No success message on top of a handler that captures nothing. A silent no-op passes every glance and fails every user.
Search, hover previews, deep-links, copy and print — exercise each on the deployed page. Static pages still run code in a browser you don’t control; it should fail visibly and gracefully, never silently.
Sweep the links against the live path, not just local. Relative paths that work at the root can break under a project subpath, and absolute ones can point at a domain that isn’t serving yet.
The two safety nets
The checklist finds today’s seams. These keep it honest after launch.
Re-run the sweep against the deployed site after each publish. Cold-load assets, cache behavior, and the metadata seam only show up on the real deployment.
Match the depth to what can actually hurt someone — their data, their trust, your credibility. A brochure page and a page taking email or money are not the same risk. Don’t audit a hobby site like it’s handling payments, and don’t ship a payments flow like it’s a hobby site.