Post-Deploy Smoke Tests for Static Sites:
A 5-Minute CI Setup

The gap between "deployed" and "works"

Static-site pipelines report success when files land on the CDN — not when the site serves correctly. A misconfigured redirect rule, an expired certificate nobody noticed, or a build that silently dropped a page all pass the deploy step green. For static sites especially, "the upload finished" and "the site works" are different questions.

A post-deploy smoke test closes that gap: one job that hits your live URL right after every release and fails loudly if anything is wrong.

The workflow

Two steps, no secrets, no third-party service. Save as .github/workflows/post-deploy.yml:

name: Post-deploy smoke test
on:
  deployment_status:            # runs on real deploys (Vercel/Cloudflare/etc.)
    states: [success]
  workflow_dispatch:            # also runnable manually

jobs:
  smoke:
    if: github.event_name == 'workflow_dispatch' || github.event.deployment_status.state == 'success'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Site responds
        uses: mahope/deskuptime@v1
        with:
          url: https://your-site.com

      - name: Compliance intact
        uses: mahope/compliance-site-check@v2
        with:
          url: https://your-site.com

Replace your-site.com with your domain. Both steps are pinned to floating major tags so fixes arrive automatically without breaking changes.

What each step checks

Add a daily schedule (optional)

The same file doubles as a daily monitor — add a cron trigger:

on:
  deployment_status:
    states: [success]
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 6 * * *'   # daily at 06:00 UTC
  workflow_dispatch:

Now a certificate expiry or host outage surfaces in the same Actions tab your team already watches — instead of an email digest from yet another SaaS dashboard nobody logs into.

What it replaces

Uptime-monitoring SaaS starts around $10–15/month per site, and compliance audits run $2,000–10,000 per engagement. Neither catches regressions between check-ins. This setup runs continuously on infrastructure you already have: free for public repositories, included minutes for private ones.