The Website Launch Checklist: What to Check Before You Go Live

Launch day is when small oversights become public. A missing redirect, an untested form, an analytics tag that never fired, none are hard to fix, all are embarrassing to discover from a customer. Here’s the checklist we run before flipping any site live, grouped so you can work through it fast.

Content & correctness

• Proofread everything, then proofread the small text. Headlines get checked; footers, error messages, and alt text get missed. Those are where typos survive.
• Every link works. Internal and external. Crawl the staging site to catch the broken ones before Google does.
• Contact details are right and live. Email, phone, address, social links, click each one. A wrong phone number on launch day is a lead-loss machine.
• Legal pages exist. Privacy policy and terms, actually written, actually linked.

SEO foundations

• One unique title and meta description per page. Not a template repeated sitewide, the single most common launch mistake.
• Canonical tags point at the real, final URL. Correct protocol, no redirect chains.
• 301 redirects from every old URL if this is a redesign. This protects years of search authority; skipping it is how sites tank after a relaunch.
• XML sitemap and robots.txt are live and correct, and the sitemap is ready to submit to Search Console.
• Structured data validates: Organization, Article, Breadcrumb, or whatever fits, and it matches the visible page.
• Open Graph and Twitter Card images render correctly, paste a link into Slack or LinkedIn and look. Absolute image URLs, or the preview breaks silently.

Performance

• Test Core Web Vitals on a real phone, on a throttled connection, not just a fast laptop. Lab scores flatter; field data ranks.
• Images are optimized: modern formats, right sizes, explicit width and height so nothing shifts as the page loads.
• The hero loads fast. It’s the largest paint; it should never be lazy-loaded or oversized.

Accessibility

• Keyboard navigation works, tab through the whole page, including the menu and any modals.
• Visible focus states on every interactive element.
• Color contrast passes for text against its background.
• Images have alt text, and animations respect reduced-motion preferences.

Technical & security

• HTTPS everywhere, with http:// redirecting to https:// and no mixed-content warnings.
• Security headers set, a small config change with real protective value.
• Forms actually deliver. Submit a real test and confirm it arrives. Silently-broken contact forms are shockingly common and invisible until someone complains.
• A custom 404 page that helps people find their way back, not a dead end.

Analytics & tracking

• Analytics is installed and firing, load the live site and confirm a real hit is sent, not just that the tag is present. (More than one launched site has “had analytics” for months and collected nothing.)
• Search Console is verified and the sitemap submitted the same day you launch.
• Goal/conversion events are set up for the actions that matter: form submits, bookings, clicks to contact.

After you flip the switch

• Request indexing for your key pages in Search Console so Google crawls now, not whenever it wanders back.
• Watch Search Console daily for two weeks, crawl errors and dropped pages show up there before they show up in your traffic.
• Keep the old site’s analytics for a few weeks to compare, if you’re replacing one.

None of this is glamorous, and all of it is the difference between a launch that just works and one you spend the first week firefighting. If you’d rather hand the whole checklist to someone who runs it on every project, that’s us, and you can see what we ship.

Everything here is standard scope in our SEO and performance service.