Q: Migration went live last night — what should I check in the first 24 hours?

Q: Migration went live last night — what should I check in the first 24 hours?

First night is about catching breakage, not chasing rankings. Here's your triage list.

Short answer: confirm crawlable, redirected, and indexable. In that order.

Long answer, run these in sequence:
— Pull up robots.txt on the live site. Make sure you didn't ship a staging 'Disallow: /'. This is the number one launch-night disaster.
— Spot-check 20 old URLs across different sections — each should 301 to the right new page in one hop.
— Check 10 key pages for a noindex tag that snuck over from staging.
— Confirm the homepage and top templates render, not just return 200.
— Verify your sitemap loads and points to new URLs.
— Submit the new sitemap in GSC.

Next step: set a reminder for day 3 to check crawl stats and coverage — don't refresh rankings hourly tonight.