The site went live. Now the checking starts.

01The quiet morning after

The deploy worked and the address resolves. Nothing dramatic follows, which can feel anticlimactic after weeks of building. Live sites are not finished sites, though; they are sites that have started collecting visitors, form submissions and history. This page is the checklist for the first week and the rhythm after, assuming the pipeline from the pillar guide is what put it there. If you arrived from a builder export instead, the now-what guide starts one step earlier.

02Seven checks for week one

03What to leave alone

A working static site rewards neglect. Certificates renew themselves without a calendar entry, and there are no plugins, because static serving has no plugin layer to load them into. Resist the urge to add a build step, a monitoring dashboard or a staging environment to a site that receives a form submission a week; that is work hunting for a problem. The one habit worth keeping is glancing at the deployment history now and then, so you always know what is live and can say what changed on Tuesday.

04The rhythm that follows

Sites built this way tend to settle into a content rhythm: request a change over coffee, read the diff, let the agent push, glance at the live page. Each change is a release in the history, so the site keeps an autobiography nobody had to write. The monthly bill is the number you signed up for, $39 after the trial, and a traffic spike does not move it.

One thing worth putting in print: live also means reachable. The contact form will eventually receive its first nonsense message, and the hosting has no spam filter to sell you. Sorting that at your own inbox is the realistic answer, and it belongs on the list of jobs nobody warns you about.