FREE 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A clean launch gets you live without breaking anything. It does not get you found. Those are two different jobs, and the second one starts the day the first one ends.
Once the site is up, the question changes. Not “does the form work” but “does anyone in Kitchener or Waterloo find this when they search for what we do.” That runs on a different set of fixes: your Google Business Profile, your citations, your reviews, and the local signals on your own pages. Most new sites put it off for six months and wonder why traffic never showed up. The local SEO checklist covers it in the same order, top to bottom.
If you are not sure how the site you already have would score, the Website Growth Score gives you a number out of 100 in about three minutes and names your weakest area.
And if you would rather not run any of this yourself, that is the job. Our website design in Kitchener-Waterloo work includes this checklist on every build. Nothing goes live until it passes.
Prefer a real Person?
Answer 10 quick questions and get your score out of 100. See what’s working, what’s not, and what to fix first. No call required.
Takes 3 minutes.
