Lesson 6 · When it breaks
Which dashboard?
You open: The card you keep: If X, open Y
Most “the website is broken” feelings are one of six situations. Each has a first dashboard. Opening the wrong one is how an afternoon disappears. This lesson is a flowchart you can reuse.
Start with what you — or a visitor — actually see, not with a theory about the stack. Wrong page content is almost never DNS. Missing mail is almost never Vercel. A red build is a gift: the live site is still the old one.
The seams are where official docs go quiet: GitHub → Vercel (push deploys), Vercel → Cloudflare (paste the A/CNAME), Cloudflare → Migadu (MX beside the website rows), and the contact form (Next.js talking SMTP to Migadu).
You can stop here. Expanding the site with new pages, Claude/Cursor, and GitHub Actions is Course 2. This course is finished when the four exit skills at the top of the home page are boring.
Practice
Work every symptom in the wizard. Then open the keep-forever card and save or print it.
Pick what you are seeing. The first dashboard is the whole skill.
Takeaway. Symptom first, dashboard second. The live site survives a failed build. Mail and DNS are a different building.
From the experts
Opening this lesson counts as done.