Small sites need smoke tests too

A small site still has a public contract.

The shortest useful smoke test is a route list:

/                     200
/blog                 200
/rss.xml              200
/blog/example-post    200
/not-real             404

That catches more than opening the homepage. Other common failures include bad frontmatter, empty tag pages, malformed RSS, missing production images, changed redirects, failed MDX hydration, and draft content leaking.

Feeds deserve direct checks:

• XML parses
• the latest post appears
• drafts are absent
• dates and item IDs are valid
• sitemap routes are public and canonical

Images are content when a post depends on them. Check the logo, Open Graph image, representative post image, and generated assets. Local serving can hide production path and case-sensitivity failures.

Old URLs need intentional redirects or clear 404s. A missing route that renders the homepage is confusing to readers and crawlers.

Content collections are small databases. Frontmatter is schema, slugs are keys, dates drive ordering, tags create indexes, and draft flags control publication. Check required fields, date validity, unique slugs, excerpts, categories, and draft behavior.

Run the same smoke test against a preview URL:

build
  -> start preview
  -> request route list
  -> parse feed and sitemap
  -> check key assets
  -> repeat against preview origin

The point is cheap detection. Routes load, feeds parse, images resolve, and intended content publishes.