Website Launch Checklist: What to Check Before You Go Live

Most of the damage a website launch can do is avoidable, and nearly all of it comes from the same short list of missed steps. Forms that silently stop working, redirects that were never built, staging sites left open to search engines, tracking that was never installed so nobody can tell what the new site actually did.

This is the checklist worth working through before a site goes live, grouped by what each item protects.

Protecting your existing search visibility

If you are replacing an existing site, this section matters more than everything else combined, because the cost of getting it wrong is paid in lost enquiries for months.

Map every old URL to a new one. Export the full list of existing URLs, including pages you forgot existed, and decide where each should go. Pages that still exist map to their new address. Pages being removed map to the closest equivalent rather than to the homepage.

Implement permanent redirects and test them. Not a sample. Run the full list after launch and confirm each resolves to a live page with a 301 rather than a 404 or a chain of hops.

Check that titles and meta descriptions came across. These are commonly lost in a rebuild, leaving dozens of pages sharing a default title.

Confirm the site can be crawled. Check the robots file is not blocking everything, which is the single most common launch catastrophe, and that pages are not carrying a noindex tag left over from staging.

Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools once the site is live.

When rankings fall after a launch, it is almost always one of these. The patterns are covered in why rankings drop.

Making sure enquiries actually reach you

A broken contact form is the most expensive bug a business website can have, because nothing appears wrong from the outside.

Submit every form yourself and confirm the message arrives in the right inbox, from the right address, with every field included. Test from an external email account, not just internally.

Check the spam filtering. Form notifications frequently land in junk after a domain or host change.

Confirm the thank-you step exists and is a real page or message, because people who are not told it worked often submit twice or assume it failed.

Test every phone number and email link on an actual phone. Numbers typed as plain text rather than tap-to-call are a steady source of lost calls.

Test any booking or payment flow end to end, including the confirmation email the customer receives.

Being able to measure anything

If tracking goes in a month after launch, you lose the ability to compare the new site against the old one, which is the one comparison that tells you whether the project worked.

Install analytics before launch and confirm it is recording. Set up conversion events for the actions that matter: form submissions, phone taps, booking completions, purchases. Verify Search Console is connected and the property matches the live domain. If you run ads, confirm the conversion tracking fires on the right step rather than on every page.

Then record your baseline. Note current organic traffic, rankings for your main terms and monthly enquiry volume, so there is something to measure against in six weeks.

Performance and mobile

Test on a mid-range phone on mobile data rather than on the machine the site was built on. Check against Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds: largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint under 200 milliseconds, cumulative layout shift under 0.1.

Confirm images are compressed and served in a modern format, that nothing overflows horizontally on a small screen, and that tap targets are large enough to hit. The usual causes of a slow launch are covered in why websites load slowly.

Content and credibility

Read every page on the live site rather than in the design file. Placeholder text survives surprisingly often, as do the wrong phone number, last year’s opening hours and a team member who left.

Check that each page has one clear heading, that images have meaningful alt text, that internal links point where they should, and that the pages carrying the most commercial weight actually say what the business does in plain language. If the homepage still does not answer what you do and who for, writing a homepage that explains what you actually do is worth reading before launch rather than after.

Technical housekeeping

Confirm the SSL certificate is installed and that every page loads over HTTPS without mixed-content warnings. Check that one version of the domain is canonical and the others redirect to it, so the site is not accessible at four addresses at once.

Make sure backups are running and that you know how to restore one. Set up uptime monitoring. Confirm the staging environment is now blocked from indexing, and ideally taken down, because duplicate staging sites appearing in search results is a recurring and avoidable problem.

Check your legal pages are present and current, and that the cookie and consent setup matches what the site actually loads.

The first two weeks after launch

Launch day is not the end of the checklist. In the days that follow, watch for crawl errors in Search Console, check that pages are being indexed, and monitor enquiry volume closely enough to notice a drop quickly.

Expect some movement in rankings during the first few weeks while search engines re-process the site. A short dip is normal. A sustained fall, or a sudden disappearance, is a signal to check the redirect map and the indexing settings rather than to wait it out.

If you are about to launch

The items above take a few hours to work through and routinely save months of recovery. The ones most often skipped are the full redirect test, the external form test and the pre-launch baseline, and those three account for most post-launch regret.

If you have a launch coming and want a second pair of eyes before it goes live, send us the staging URL and the current site. We will check the migration plan, the tracking and the technical setup, and tell you what would break. Our website design and development work includes that process as standard, and technical SEO covers the migration side where the build is already under way elsewhere.