Engineering notes
Things we hit building and running our own software. Written up because we had to work them out, and the answers were not obvious.
Make the SEO contract a build gate
Metadata regressions are silent. A build that fails on them turns a slow content problem into an immediate one.
Your navigation may contain no links
A React dropdown nav that renders buttons instead of anchors, and unmounts when closed, ships zero navigation to a crawler.
Server rendering is not a status code
A server-rendered page can still return 200 for a URL that does not exist. These are separate layers, and conflating them is common.