FREE CHECKLIST

The Website Launch Checklist

The things that have to be right before a new website goes live. Miss one and you launch with broken tracking, lost rankings, or a form that quietly fails. Work through it before you flip the switch.

Website Launch Checklist

Launching a website is the moment most likely to break things that were working, or ship things that were never checked. Analytics that were never installed. A contact form nobody tested. Old pages that used to rank, now returning 404s because nobody mapped the redirects. None of it is hard to catch. It just has to be caught before launch, not after a client calls asking why their form does not work.

This is the list we run before every site we put live. Go through it top to bottom.

1. Before You Launch: Content and Design

This is the layer everyone sees first and the one most likely to ship with small mistakes. A typo, a dead link, or a page that falls apart on mobile costs you trust before a visitor reads a word of your offer. Catch it here.

Proofread every page. Typos on a fresh site undercut trust before anyone reads a word of your pitch. Read it out loud or have someone else check it.
Check every link. Internal links, external links, buttons, menu items. A dead link on day one looks careless.
Confirm every image has alt text. For accessibility and for SEO. Empty alt attributes are a missed signal and a missed compliance step.
Test on real devices, not just the desktop preview. Phone, tablet, and a couple of browsers. Most of your traffic is on mobile, so the mobile view is the real view.
Check load speed before you launch, not after. Compress images, and confirm nothing heavy is dragging the page down. A slow first impression is hard to recover from.

2. Forms and Contact

This is the section that fails silently. A form can look perfect and still send nothing, or send it to an inbox nobody checks. Every lead that hits a broken form is gone with no error message and no way to get it back, so test every one before launch.

Submit every form yourself. Contact form, quote request, newsletter signup. Fill it out and hit send.
Confirm the submission actually arrives. Check that the email lands in the right inbox, not a spam folder or a dead address nobody monitors.
Set up and test the confirmation the user sees. A thank-you message or page so the person knows it went through. Without it, people submit twice or assume it failed.
Check your spam protection. A form with no protection fills your inbox with junk. Too aggressive, and it blocks real people. Test that a normal submission gets through.

3. Tracking and Analytics

If tracking is not live the day you launch, that data is gone for good. You cannot go back and recover the traffic you did not measure. Get this in place before the first visitor arrives, not after you wish you had.

Install Google Analytics 4. Confirm it is firing on every page, not just the homepage. Use the real-time report to verify your own visit shows up.
Set up Google Search Console. Verify the site and submit your sitemap. This is how you see what Google thinks of your site and catch problems early.
Confirm your sitemap exists and is submitted. An XML sitemap tells Google what to crawl. Generate it, check it loads, submit it in Search Console.
Set up conversion tracking. At minimum, track form submissions and calls. A site you cannot measure is a site you cannot improve.

4. SEO Foundations

These are the signals that decide whether Google can find, understand, and rank your site. Most are quick to set right at launch and painful to fix later once bad patterns are baked in. A single blocked setting here can keep your whole site out of search.

Write a unique title tag and meta description for every page. Not auto-generated duplicates. Each page should say what it is and be worth clicking in search results.
Set one clear H1 per page. Your main heading, using the terms that page should rank for. One per page, not several.
Map your redirects before launch. If you are replacing an old site, every old URL that had traffic or rankings needs a 301 redirect to its new equivalent. Skip this and you throw away rankings you already earned.
Check your robots.txt is not blocking the site. Staging sites are often set to block search engines. Launching with that still in place makes your whole site invisible. This is one of the most common and most damaging launch mistakes.
Confirm indexing is turned on. In WordPress, make sure "Discourage search engines" is unchecked. Same failure as above, different switch.

5. Technical and Security

The plumbing. None of it is visible when it works, and all of it is visible when it breaks. A missing SSL certificate or a bad redirect turns visitors away before they see your site at all, so confirm each one is handled.

Confirm SSL is active. The site should load on https with a padlock. No padlock, and browsers warn visitors away before they see anything.
Force https across the whole site. Every http version should redirect to https. Mixed versions cause security warnings and split your SEO signals.
Set up automatic backups. Before launch and on an ongoing schedule. When something breaks, a backup is the difference between a five-minute fix and a lost weekend.
Connect the domain correctly. Confirm the domain points where it should and that both the www and non-www versions resolve to one canonical version.

6. Local and Business Details

If you serve a local market, these tie your new site to how people actually find you. They are small, they are quick, and almost every new site skips them, which is exactly why handling them puts you ahead.

Confirm your NAP is correct and consistent. Name, address, and phone in the footer, matching your Google Business Profile exactly.
Link your Google Business Profile. Add your website to your GBP and your GBP to your site. They should point at each other.
Add LocalBusiness schema. Structured data telling Google your core business details in a format it reads directly. Most new sites skip it. It is worth the few minutes.

After launch: the first week

Launch is not the finish line. The first week is when problems that passed every pre-launch test show up under real conditions, and it is your last easy chance to catch them before they cost you. Real traffic behaves in ways a test submission never will, so check these while the site is new and the damage from anything broken is still small.

Recheck forms 24 hours in. Things that passed a test can fail under real conditions. Confirm real submissions are still arriving.
Watch Search Console for crawl errors. Google will start reporting anything it cannot reach. Catch it in the first week, not the first quarter.
Confirm analytics is collecting real traffic. Not just your test visit. Real numbers by the second or third day.

The part that is easy to get wrong

Any single item here is simple. The problem is that launch day is busy, and the items that fail silently, the untested form, the missing redirect, the tracking that was never installed, are exactly the ones nobody notices until the damage is done.

We run this checklist on every site we build, because we have seen what each missed item costs. If you would rather launch knowing it was done right, book a call and we will talk about your project.

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You can work through this list yourself, and if you do, you will catch most of what trips up a launch. But the items that fail silently are exactly the ones that are hardest to spot on your own site, because you are too close to it. We run this checklist on every site we build. If you want it checked before you flip the switch, book a call.