A website launch checklist

Before the domain is attached

Read every page as a visitor. Placeholder text, images with no description, a phone number that was a stand-in, and a heading nobody finished are all still there more often than anybody expects.

Check every internal link goes where it says. Our page on broken links covers the routine, and a site launched with dead links looks unfinished at the worst moment.

Then run a structural check. Our site check reports heading order, alt text and structure across every page in one pass, which is faster than reading for it.

Read the page titles and descriptions as a set. Duplicates and leftovers from a template are common, and they are the first thing anybody sees in a search result once the site is found.

Forms, which fail most often

Submit every form yourself, from a phone as well as a computer. Confirm the message arrives, confirm the sender gets an acknowledgment, and confirm the record is stored somewhere you can reach.

Send one to a second address as well. A form delivering only to one inbox is one filter change away from silently losing every enquiry the site produces.

Our page on contact forms covers the arrangement that survives. Testing takes two minutes and it is the check most often skipped.

The technical essentials

The secure certificate covering your real address, the site reachable with and without the leading subdomain, and a sitemap that lists every page you want found.

Check that nothing is accidentally blocked. A site built behind a preview setting frequently launches still telling search engines to stay away, which is invisible until somebody wonders why nothing is indexed.

Our page on noindex settings covers where that hides. It is the single most common launch mistake, it keeps a search engine and an answer engine out entirely, and it is the easiest thing to miss.

Check that one version of the address is the canonical one. A site reachable at two addresses without a preference stated is competing with itself before it has a single visitor.

The full pre-launch list

The list below is what we work through before anything goes live. An hour gets through all of it and the items are ordered by how expensive they are to discover afterward.

• Nothing blocked from search by a leftover setting
• Every form tested, delivering to two addresses
• Secure certificate covering the real address
• Every page loads and every internal link works
• No placeholder text, images or phone numbers
• Works properly on a phone on a slow connection
• Terms, privacy and any required notices in place

On a phone, on a real connection

Most visitors arrive on a phone, frequently on a poor connection, and the experience there is meaningfully different from a desktop preview.

Check that the phone number is tappable, the forms are usable with a thumb, and nothing important is hidden behind an interaction that does not work on touch.

Time it. A page that takes eight seconds on a phone has lost a substantial share of visitors before they read anything, whatever it looked like on your desk.

Immediately after launch

Test everything again on the real address. Forms, links, the certificate and the pages. The environment genuinely changes when the domain is attached and things do break at that point.

Submit the sitemap and check indexing has begun. Our page on getting listed covers the steps, which take ten minutes and are frequently postponed for months.

Then update every profile, listing and printed reference to point at the live address, including any that still reference a previous site.

The week after

Watch for pages returning errors and for anything reported by search tools. Our page on the coverage report covers what an ordinary settling period looks like.

Ask two people who have never seen the site to find something specific on it. Ten minutes of watching somebody else use it finds more than any checklist.

And check the forms again. A form that worked on launch day and stopped in week two is the failure that costs the most and announces itself the least.