Developer Deploys Three Post-Build Checks After Sitemap Bug Eludes Detection for Five Days
A developer who spent two weeks hunting down silent production failures has implemented three automated post-deploy checks for his Cloudflare Pages sites, after a _redirects rule blocked his sitemap from search crawlers for five days without any visible browser error.
“I had a _redirects rule rewriting sitemap-index.xml → sitemap-0.xml as an emergency workaround that turned out to be wrong,” the developer told reporters. “It was live for five days before I found it. The rule was blocking the real sitemap-index.xml from reaching crawlers while appearing fine in the browser, which followed the redirect.”
The three checks—sitemap reachability, IndexNow batch submission, and a weekly Lighthouse audit—target specific failure modes the developer has encountered across three static sites: aiappdex.com, findindiegame.com, and ossfind.com. All are built with Astro 5 and SSG on Cloudflare Pages.