Shipping a static site can feel low risk until you remember there is no server to patch later for a broken RSS path or a typo in canonical URLs. The safety net is discipline before deploy.
Here is the checklist I actually run through—not exhaustive, but enough to catch the mistakes that waste an evening.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Build and smoke
Run a production build locally and fix every warning you agree matters. Open the generated dist (or let CI artifacts do it) and click the pages that changed—not only the homepage.
Links and slugs
If you renamed posts or slugs, search the repo for old paths and for internal links that still point at retired URLs. Static hosts will happily serve 404 forever.
Social and feeds
Regenerate or inspect rss.xml and any sitemap output. Feed readers do not forgive a bad link, and search engines notice when metadata drifts from the page title.
Content passes
Read the new post aloud once. Fix awkward sentences and check code fences. If you reference “today” or “this week,” decide whether it will age badly—and trim if it will.
Done
The goal is not perfection on day one. It is confidence that what you shipped matches what you think you shipped. The rest can ride in the next small change.