Website Launch Checklist Before You Go Live

Content & links

0/5

Click every link in primary navigation and footer, including on mobileBroken navigation is the fastest way to lose a visitor's trust in the first ten seconds.
Search the whole site for placeholder text — lorem ipsum, TODO, TBD, [insert]Placeholder copy that ships is invisible to whoever wrote it and glaring to everyone else.
Verify every image has real alt text, not a filename or blank stringMissing alt text fails screen-reader users and gives search engines nothing to index the image by.
Check forms actually submit and the confirmation shown matches what really happenedA form that fails silently loses leads without anyone noticing until someone asks why nothing arrived.
Test the 404 page renders correctly and links back into the siteEvery site accumulates dead links eventually — a broken 404 page turns a small miss into a dead end.

0/5

Confirm every page has a unique, descriptive title tag and meta descriptionDuplicate or missing titles are one of the most common reasons pages don't get indexed distinctly.
Verify canonical tags point to the intended URL, especially on pages reachable multiple waysWithout a canonical, search engines may index the wrong version or split ranking signal across duplicates.
Check robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking the whole siteA leftover 'Disallow: /' from staging is the single most common reason a launched site never gets indexed.
Submit the sitemap and the domain to Search Console (or equivalent) once DNS has switchedIndexing starts from this signal — waiting on organic discovery alone costs real time.
Set up 301 redirects for any URL that changed from a previous version of the siteUnredirected old URLs lose the backlinks and rankings that URL had already earned.

0/4

Run a Core Web Vitals check (LCP, INP, CLS) on the real production build, not a local dev serverDev servers skip the minification, caching, and CDN behavior that determine real-world speed.
Confirm images are compressed and served in a modern format like WebP or AVIFUnoptimized images are the single biggest cause of slow page loads on most sites.
Test the site on a throttled mobile connection, not just fast office wifiMost launches get judged first on a phone, often on a network slower than the one it was built on.
Verify caching headers are set on static assetsWithout them, every repeat visitor re-downloads assets that should have loaded instantly from cache.

0/4

Confirm analytics tracking fires on a real page view before launch, not just in a test environmentMissing analytics on day one means the launch's first traffic is permanently unmeasured.
Check the cookie consent banner (where required) blocks tracking scripts until consent is givenFiring analytics or ad scripts before consent is a compliance violation under GDPR and similar laws.
Verify a privacy policy and terms page exist and are linked from the footerThese pages are often the last thing built and the first thing a visitor — or a regulator — looks for.
Confirm any contact form or data collection states what the data is used forCollecting data without disclosure is both a legal risk and a trust cost.

0/4

Monitor error logs and uptime for the first 24-48 hours after go-liveLaunch traffic and DNS propagation surface issues a staging environment never would.
Re-check indexing status a few days after launchConfirms the sitemap submission actually took and pages are being crawled, not just accepted.
Watch real user analytics for a traffic or conversion drop against the previous siteCatches regressions — a broken checkout, a missing redirect — that manual testing missed.
Archive or redirect the staging environment so it doesn't get indexed as a duplicate siteAn open staging URL competing with production for the same content splits search visibility.