My homepage disappeared

Was there, now it's a 404. Here's the one thing that causes this almost every time.

This is almost always caused by index.html not making it into your deploy output. Your build process creates a _site/ folder, copies specific files into it, and deploys that folder. If index.html wasn't on the copy list — or something overwrote it — it doesn't exist on the live server.

Check this first

ls _site/index.html

Run that locally after your build. If it returns "No such file" — that's your problem. The homepage isn't in the deploy output.

Get it back in 60 seconds

Find the last commit where the homepage was right:

git log --oneline -- index.html

Then restore it:

git checkout [that-commit-hash] -- index.html
git commit -m "restore: homepage"
git push

Stop it from happening again

Add a homepage lock to your build script — runs right after mkdir -p _site, copies the real file every single time:

[ -f index.html ] && cp index.html _site/index.html && echo "homepage preserved"