Website Launch Checklist: 43 Things to Check Before You Go Live

Launch day has a way of hiding problems. The site looks fine on the designer’s laptop, the client is excited, and then a form quietly sends to the wrong inbox for three weeks, or a leftover noindex tag keeps Google away for a month. Almost every launch problem we have seen could have been caught in an hour with a checklist.

This is the one we use. It is written for business websites (company sites, service businesses, small online stores), not for large web apps. Tick items off in order, and don’t skip the boring ones: those are the ones that cost money.

A free copy you can copy into your own notes is also on our GitHub.

1. Content and design

Before anything technical, look at the site the way a customer would.

• Every page has one clear purpose and one main call to action.
• No placeholder text, lorem ipsum or stock-photo watermarks left behind.
• Contact details (email, phone, WhatsApp) are correct, and the numbers are tappable on a phone.
• Legal pages exist: privacy policy, terms, and a cookie notice if you use tracking.
• Every form sends to the right inbox, and you have submitted a real test through each one.
• There is a custom 404 page that links back to the homepage.
• Spelling and names are checked, especially your own business name and the names of people and places.

2. Mobile and accessibility

Most visitors to a small business site arrive on a phone, often a mid-range one on a mobile connection.

• Check on a real phone, not just by shrinking a browser window.
• Text is readable without zooming and buttons are large enough to tap without hitting the wrong one.
• Images have meaningful alt text that describes what they show.
• Text and background colours have enough contrast to read in sunlight.
• The whole site can be used with a keyboard alone: you can tab to every link and button, and you can see where you are.
• Pop-ups and chat widgets don’t cover the content or the main buttons on small screens.

3. Speed

Speed is part of the product, not a nice extra. Run Google’s PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and one inner page, on the mobile setting, and look at three numbers. Google’s published targets for “good” are Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1.

• Images are compressed, sized for how they are displayed, and served in a modern format such as WebP.
• Images have width and height set, so the page doesn’t jump while loading. This is the most common cause of layout shift.
• You use as few fonts and font weights as the design needs, with a sensible fallback.
• Analytics, chat widgets and ad pixels load after the page, not before it.
• Unused scripts and plugins are removed. Every tool you add makes the site a little slower.

We went deeper on what slows a site down in why load time costs you customers.

4. Technical SEO

This section is where most launches go wrong, because none of it is visible on the page.

• Every page has its own <title> and meta description, written for people, not stuffed with keywords.
• Each page has exactly one <h1>, and headings follow a sensible order.
• A canonical URL is set on each page.
• robots.txt allows crawling. A staging setting that blocks all crawlers is a classic launch-day mistake.
• No leftover noindex tags from the staging site. Search the source of your key pages for the word “noindex”.
• An XML sitemap exists, lists only pages you want indexed, and uses accurate last-modified dates.
• Old URLs redirect with a permanent (301) redirect straight to the new address, with no chains.
• Internal links point to the final URLs rather than to redirects.
• Social sharing images (Open Graph) are set, so shared links look right on WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Two things we learned the hard way on our own site: a sitemap that gives every page the same last-modified date teaches Google to ignore the dates, and dozens of near-identical location pages can leave many of your pages stuck in “Discovered – currently not indexed”. Our small business SEO guide covers what to do instead.

5. Search Console and analytics

Set these up on launch day, because you cannot get back the data from before you installed them.

• Your domain is verified in Google Search Console and the sitemap is submitted.
• Request indexing for your most important pages using the URL Inspection tool.
• Analytics is installed, and the actions that matter are tracked as conversions: form submissions, WhatsApp clicks, calls and purchases.
• Bing Webmaster Tools is set up. You can import your Search Console setup in a few clicks.
• If you run ads, the pixel or tag fires once, not twice.

6. Security

A new site that is not looked after becomes someone else’s problem quickly.

• Everything loads over HTTPS and plain HTTP redirects to it.
• Security headers are in place (HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy at a minimum).
• Every admin login has a strong, unique password and two-factor authentication where available.
• The CMS, plugins and libraries are on current versions.
• Automatic backups are running, and you have tested a restore at least once. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup.
• No API keys, passwords or private files are in publicly accessible code or folders.

If you want the full picture of what to watch for, read five signs your site needs a security audit.

7. Business basics

• Your Google Business Profile is claimed, complete, and links to the new site.
• Your business name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear online.
• Email on your own domain has SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, so your messages reach inboxes instead of spam.
• Uptime monitoring is switched on, so you hear about an outage before your customers tell you.
• Someone is named as responsible for the site after launch.

After launch: the first 30 days

The launch is the beginning of the work, not the end.

1. Week 1: Check Search Console daily for crawl errors and indexing problems. Fix any 404 pages that appear.
2. Week 2: Review which pages are getting impressions but few clicks, and improve their titles and descriptions.
3. Weeks 3 and 4: Ask your first customers for reviews, and add real examples of your work to the site.
4. Every month: Review speed, security updates and your top pages. If you’d rather not do this yourself, that is what our care plans cover.

How to use this list

Print it or copy it into a shared document and assign each section to a person. Go through it twice: once before launch on a staging copy, and once on the live site in the first hour, because some problems only appear after the final deploy. Keep the completed list. It will save you the next time you redesign.

If you would rather have someone else run these checks, every site we build goes through them before it is handed over. See how we work on our website development page, check pricing, or talk to us about your project.