What this check inspects
Shipwork takes the subdomains from your certificate history, removes the obvious infrastructure names such as mail, DNS, CDN and verification records, and asks each remaining name over HTTP whether it answers with a success status right now. The list is capped so it stays short, and only names that actually answered are reported as live. A name that does not resolve or times out is silently not live, never guessed at.
What a failure means
A subdomain that is live right now is a warning, because it is a part of the site that is easy to lose track of. The check never claims the subdomain is unknown to you or unindexed; only that it is reachable and is not the address you gave. When nothing is live, it reports the number checked and says none answered. When there are no non-infrastructure names, or certificate history cannot be read, it says so rather than reporting a pass.
How to fix it
- Look through the live names for staging, dev, test, admin and old project names.
- Put authentication or a network rule in front of any environment that is not meant to be public.
- Add robots noindex to non-production hosts as a second layer, not as the only layer.
- Take down hosts that no longer serve a purpose, and let the certificate lapse.
A typical failure, worked through
The setupA store spun up staging.example.com for a theme migration and never took it down. It still has a certificate and still serves the old catalogue.
What the check reportsThe check reads the certificate history, removes infrastructure names, probes the remainder, and reports that staging.example.com answered live right now.
The pointCertificate logs do not care that the host was temporary. The check closes the gap between a name existing in history and that name still answering today.