What should be on a website launch checklist?
Six areas: content, forms, search, tracking, speed and legal. Then a short set of launch-day and after-launch checks.
Most launch problems aren't dramatic. They're a form that sends to an old email address, or a setting from the preview that still tells Google to stay away. Each one is quick to fix and expensive to miss.
What do you check before launch?
Run these on the finished site, on the preview link, a day or two before you go live.
- Read every page on a phone. Check spelling, prices, opening hours, phone numbers and addresses.
- Click every link and button, including the menu, the footer and the logo.
- Submit every form and check the email arrives at the right inbox, with an auto-reply if you use one.
- Tap every phone number and email link on a phone to check they open correctly.
- Give every page a unique title and meta description, and check each has one H1.
- Add alt text to meaningful images, and check text is readable against its background.
- Make sure structured data such as Organization, LocalBusiness and FAQ schema is valid.
- Build an XML sitemap and check robots.txt doesn't block pages you want found.
- Prepare the redirect list: every old URL that changes points to its closest new page with a permanent redirect.
- Set up analytics and conversion events for forms, calls and sales, and send test conversions.
- Test speed on a phone with PageSpeed Insights, and fix anything heavy before launch.
- Add a privacy policy and, if you use non-essential cookies such as analytics, a cookie banner that asks first.
What do you check on launch day?
Go live early in the day and early in the week, so there's time to fix anything before the weekend.
- Point the domain and check the site loads on both the www and non-www versions, with one redirecting to the other.
- Check the security certificate is working and every page loads over HTTPS.
- Remove any noindex tag or password left on from the preview.
- Test the top redirects by typing the old URLs into a browser.
- Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Submit one live form and make one test call through the site.
- Update the website link on your Google Business Profile, social profiles and email signatures if it changed.
What do you check in the first two weeks after launch?
Watch three things: Search Console, enquiries and errors. A new site should settle within a few weeks, and anything that drops is easier to fix early.
In Search Console, check pages are being indexed and look for crawl errors or 404s from old URLs you missed. Compare enquiries with the weeks before launch. Ask a couple of customers to use the site and tell you what confused them.
Who should run the website launch checklist?
Whoever built the site should run the technical checks, and someone in your business should run the content checks. You know your prices, hours and services better than any developer.
Doing both means the two most common launch problems, wrong details and broken settings, both get caught.