Staging vs production: where to scan for broken links

Staging is for not shipping a white screen. It is a weak oracle for broken links. Hosts differ (staging.example.com vs www.example.com). Absolute hrefs baked into the CMS point at production while you stare at staging, or the reverse. robots.txt on staging may 403 the crawler. HTTP auth blocks the extension the same way it blocks Googlebot.

If you only scan staging, you miss production-only assets: the live CDN, the tag manager container, the “real” PDF in the footer.

Practical split

• Before launch: scan staging to catch template bugs. Note that auth walls and relative URLs can hide failures.
• At launch: scan production. This is the pass that matches Search Console. See after a redesign.
• Preview domains (Webflow, Vercel, Netlify): treat them as staging. Scan the custom domain too. Webflow notes.

Chrome

Open the host you care about. If Chrome can load it, the extension can scan it. chrome:// and the Web Store cannot. Basic auth: log in in the tab first, then scan.

Export two CSVs if you must compare staging and prod. Diff the 404 list; do not assume they match.

The user does not visit your preview URL. Scan that last, not first.