Columbia Games · WordPress / June 2026
A 200 OK on the homepage proves almost nothing about WordPress admin after an upgrade
Post-upgrade smoke checks were split across business and admin paths. A healthy homepage can still coexist with broken uploads, cron, login or plugin configuration.
Situation
The simplest deployment check is to open the homepage, see a 200 response and declare success. WordPress makes that especially misleading because cache can keep serving a good public page even while the admin, PHP runtime or a background task is already broken.
Approach
The smoke list covered login, the admin dashboard, media, permalinks, search, a representative content page, cron state and the presence of important measurement plugins. This was not meant to become a full regression suite; it was a small, fast contract describing the minimum behaviour required before an upgrade could be considered successful.
Outcome
Post-release verification took a few minutes longer but covered a much larger part of the system. Failures surfaced close to the change that caused them instead of appearing days later as an editor complaint.