Small sites need smoke tests too

Small sites need smoke tests because small sites still break in public.

The site can be tiny and still depend on routing, RSS, content collections, generated images, redirects, scripts, and deployment behavior. The failure is usually not dramatic. It is a broken post page, a missing feed item, or a build that passes while the important route renders the wrong thing.

check the public contract

The shortest useful smoke test is boring:

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

That is enough to catch a surprising amount of breakage. The homepage is not the whole site.

the usual misses

Small-site testing often stops at “the homepage loads.” That misses the places static sites actually fail:

a blog post route with bad frontmatter
a tag page with no posts
an RSS feed with malformed XML
an image path that works locally but not after build
a redirect that changed during a redesign
a content query that sorts incorrectly
an MDX island that fails hydration
a draft post leaking into production

The smoke test should cover the public contract, not the one page everyone remembers to open.

feeds deserve direct checks

Feeds do not get enough attention because nobody sees them in the browser during normal development.

For RSS:

XML parses
latest post appears
draft posts are absent
item links are absolute or intentionally relative
dates are valid
duplicate item IDs are absent

For sitemap:

XML parses
public routes appear
draft routes are absent
canonical URLs use the production origin

These checks are not glamorous. They protect the readers and machines that consume the site without visiting the homepage.

images are part of the content

Image bugs are common on small sites.

The local dev server may serve an asset that the production build does not include. A generated image may have the wrong path. A remote image may time out. A case-sensitive filesystem may reject a path that worked locally.

At minimum I want checks for:

site logo or avatar
Open Graph image
one blog post image
one generated asset if the site creates them

If the post depends on visual examples, the images are not decoration. They are the content.

redirects and missing routes

Old URLs keep living after a redesign.

If a post slug changes, a project page moves, or /feed.xml becomes /rss.xml, the site should either redirect intentionally or return a clear 404. Accidental 200s are bad too. A missing route that renders the homepage can confuse readers, crawlers, and debugging tools.

I like including one known redirect and one known missing route. That proves the site handles both memory and absence.

content collections are small databases

Static sites with content collections are basically tiny databases.

Frontmatter is schema. Slugs are keys. Dates drive sorting. Tags drive indexes. Draft flags drive publishing behavior. Excerpts show up in feeds and cards.

If the schema gets loose, the site breaks quietly. I want checks for required title, valid publish date, draft behavior, unique slugs, non-empty excerpt, valid category, tags shaped consistently, and any site-specific heading convention.

preview needs the same check

Small sites often deploy through preview URLs. That is great, but the preview should be smoke-tested with the same route list.

Some bugs only show up with the deployed origin: canonical URLs, feed links, asset prefixes, redirects, and environment-specific config.

The flow can stay simple:

build
  -> start static preview
  -> request route list
  -> parse feed and sitemap
  -> check key assets
  -> deploy preview
  -> repeat route smoke test against preview URL

The point is not coverage for its own sake. The point is to make breakage cheap to notice.

Small sites still have public contracts. Routes should load. Feeds should parse. Images should resolve. Content should publish when intended.

A tiny smoke test respects that contract without turning a personal site into enterprise theater.

#testing #astro #quality