Website launch checklist: what to check before going live

Start with what visitors will actually read. Template leftovers and placeholder text are the most common launch day embarrassment.

• Read every page once on the staging site, including the footer, the 404 page and thank you pages. Search the site for lorem ipsum and for the name of the theme or template.
• Check company details: registry code, VAT number, address, phone, email and opening hours. They should match your Google Business Profile and your invoices.
• Click every menu item, button and footer link. Pay attention to links that still point to the staging domain.
• Check every language version separately. Untranslated buttons, mixed language menus and form messages in the wrong language are easy to miss.
• Confirm that images are your own or licensed, have alt text and are not several megabytes each.

Ask someone who has not seen the site before to complete one task, such as finding the price of a service and sending an enquiry. Watching them for five minutes reveals more than an hour of your own review.

A form that fails silently costs real money, because nobody knows the enquiries are missing.

• Submit every form on the site and confirm the message arrives in the right inbox, not in spam. Test from a phone as well.
• Check the sender address and the domain's email settings. SPF, DKIM and DMARC records should be in place so that notifications and auto replies are delivered.
• Verify what the visitor sees after submitting: a clear confirmation, and ideally a copy by email.
• Confirm that spam protection is active and does not block real submissions.
• For a store, place a real order with each payment method and each delivery method, then refund it. Check the order emails, the invoice, VAT and stock changes.
• Switch payment gateways from test mode to live mode and make sure the live keys are in place.

If forms feed a CRM or a booking system, follow one test enquiry all the way through to the place where your team will actually see it.

If the new site replaces an old one, this section decides whether you keep your search traffic.

• Export a list of all old URLs from the old sitemap, Search Console and analytics. Every old address must either still exist or redirect with a 301 to the closest matching new page, not all of them to the homepage.
• Remove the noindex setting and any robots.txt block used during development. This is the single most damaging thing to forget.
• Check that each page has a unique title and meta description, one H1 and a canonical tag pointing to its own live address.
• Make sure the XML sitemap lists the live domain and only pages that should be indexed.
• On multilingual sites, confirm that hreflang tags reference the final URLs.
• Check that the site answers on one address only: https with or without www, with the other variants redirecting to it.

Keep the redirect map in a spreadsheet. You will need it again when someone reports a broken link three months later.

These checks take an afternoon and prevent most of the problems that surface in the first month.

• Run PageSpeed Insights on the homepage, one service or category page and one article or product. Fix oversized images and unused scripts before launch, not after.
• Open the site on a real phone, not only in a desktop browser's mobile view. Check menus, forms, tap targets and tables.
• Confirm the SSL certificate is valid, renews automatically and that there are no mixed content warnings.
• Change default admin usernames, remove test accounts and enable two factor authentication for administrators.
• Set up automatic backups stored outside the web server and test that one can be restored.
• Publish the privacy policy and, for a store, terms of sale and returns information. Make sure the cookie banner actually blocks analytics and marketing scripts until consent is given.
• Add a favicon and a social sharing image, then paste the link into a messenger to see how the preview looks.

None of these items is difficult, but each is far easier to fix before visitors and search engines have seen the site.

Measurement must work from the first day, otherwise you cannot compare the new site with the old one.

• Install analytics with consent mode, exclude your own office traffic and define conversions: form submissions, phone clicks, orders.
• Verify the domain in Google Search Console and submit the sitemap.
• Lower the DNS record TTL a day or two before the switch so the change spreads quickly.
• Launch early in the week and early in the day, never on a Friday afternoon. You want the people who built the site available if something breaks.
• Keep the old site and its database as an archive for at least a few months.

During the first week, look at Search Console daily for crawl errors and 404 pages, and add redirects for any address you missed. Compare form submissions and orders with your usual volume. A sudden drop to zero usually means a technical fault, not a lack of interest.

After a month, compare traffic, enquiries and rankings with the period before launch. A small dip in the first weeks after a redesign is normal; a steady decline is a sign that redirects or indexing need attention.