A cat napping by a computer

Checklist before shipping a small personal site

Small sites are deceptively easy to ship. They are also easy to forget after launch. A short checklist helps avoid obvious problems and keeps maintenance low.

This is the one I use before I push changes to production.

Reliability

  • Build locally from a clean state
  • Confirm required environment variables exist in production
  • Verify one happy-path request and one failure-path request for key endpoints
  • Keep at least one previous deploy ready to roll back

If the site has a contact form, I always test end to end:

  1. submit from the UI
  2. confirm provider logs show success
  3. confirm message arrives at the real inbox
  4. confirm reply goes to the sender

SEO and discoverability

  • Page titles and descriptions are specific (not reused across unrelated pages)
  • Canonical URLs are correct
  • Open Graph image exists for pages that matter
  • robots.txt and sitemap are reachable
  • RSS feed renders without errors

For blog posts, I check:

  • one clear headline
  • one practical takeaway
  • internal links to related posts
  • visible publish date

Performance basics

I do not over-optimize personal sites, but I do avoid obvious regressions:

  • large images are compressed
  • no accidental megabyte-sized JS dependency
  • no long-running client-side work on page load

If a feature is optional and expensive, I gate it behind conditions or keep it server-side where possible.

Content quality

Before publishing any post, I ask:

  • Is there at least one thing the reader can apply today?
  • Is there one concrete command, snippet, or checklist?
  • Can someone skim this in two minutes and still get value?

Personal sites do better when posts are useful, not just frequent.

Operational hygiene

  • Secrets are never committed
  • Error messages shown to users are safe and non-sensitive
  • Logs include enough context for debugging but no private data

I also keep changes small. If I cannot explain a deploy in a few lines, it is usually too big for one release.

This looks like a lot on paper, but in practice it takes 10–15 minutes and catches most painful mistakes. The goal is not perfection; the goal is shipping confidently and sleeping well after deploy.

Hero image: Computer Cat Nap, freely licensed on Wikimedia Commons.

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