QA a migration before you flip the switch

Dear reader,

The scariest migrations are the ones where nobody looked properly before going live. Almost every launch-day fire was visible the day before, if someone had known where to look.

So look, deliberately, with a list.

A pre-launch checklist

1. Checkout end to end, on mobile, with a real payment method
2. Redirects from your top old URLs landing in the right place
3. Key templates (product, collection, cart) across a few edge cases
4. Emails firing correctly: order confirmation, shipping, resets
5. Analytics and tags recording the right events

Tick those and most of the risk is gone. Skip them and you're testing in production with real customers, which is the most expensive place to find a bug.

Go-live should be boring. If it's exciting, something wasn't checked.

Give it a dry run

Where you can, rehearse the switch on a staging environment first. The rehearsal finds the surprises while they're still cheap.

Launch quietly, watch closely, and keep the old site on standby. Confidence at go-live comes from the checking you did before it, not from luck.