Your pre-deployment checklist

Regardless of how you intend to deploy your site, there are a few steps you should follow on your local machine to ensure that your first deployment will run smoothly:

1. Ensure any deployment platform plugins that are required have been installed. A couple of the platforms we will look at have Gatsby plugins specifically for use with their product. By adding them to your Gatsby site, the platform is better able to understand your project and, as a result, build your site faster.
2. Make sure your Gatsby site builds without an error. Once the build has passed successfully, try running gatsby serve to ensure that you can use the site without issue.
3. Ensure all your tests are passing. Make sure that you have run your unit tests that we set up in Chapter 7, Testing and Auditing Your Site, using npm run test, and ensure that they are all passing.
4. Take note of your Node.js version. As of Gatsby version 4, your Node.js version should be 14 or higher...