Website Launch Checklist: What to Check Before You Go Live
Launch day problems are almost never exotic. They are a staging site left open to search engines, a contact form that goes to an address nobody reads, and an old URL structure with no redirects.
This checklist covers what to verify before you go live, in the order a launch actually happens, and what to watch in the first hour and the first week.
Before launch: technical#
These are the checks that are hard to notice from the outside and expensive to discover late.
- HTTPS works on every page, and HTTP redirects to it with a 301.
- One canonical hostname: www or non-www, with the other redirecting. Not both serving content.
- The staging site is password-protected or blocked, and its noindex has NOT been copied to production.
- robots.txt on production allows crawling. This is the single most common launch mistake.
- A 404 page exists, returns an actual 404 status, and offers a way onward.
- Forms submit, store the record, and send notifications to an address someone reads.
- Backups are configured and one restore has been tested. Untested backups are not backups.
- Error logging is on and someone receives the alerts.
Check the response status codes, not just the pages. A "404 page" that returns HTTP 200 tells search engines every mistyped URL is a real page.
Before launch: content and SEO#
Content checks are quick but they are the ones visitors notice first, and the SEO checks are the ones that are painful to fix after the fact.
- Every page has a unique title and meta description that reflect what is on it.
- No placeholder text, no "Lorem ipsum", no "[client name]" left anywhere.
- Every image has meaningful alt text — decorative images get an empty alt, not a missing one.
- Heading structure is sane: one H1 per page, no jumps from H1 to H4.
- Internal links all resolve; no links to the staging domain.
- XML sitemap generates, lists only indexable URLs, and is referenced in robots.txt.
- Redirects from every old URL with traffic or links, mapped and tested.
- Structured data validates on the templates that carry it.
- Open Graph tags produce a sensible preview when the URL is pasted into a chat app.
Before launch: legal, analytics and accessibility#
The parts most often left to "after launch", which then means never.
| Item | Check |
|---|---|
| Privacy policy | Present, accurate about what you actually collect, linked from every page |
| Cookie consent | Required if you set non-essential cookies; blocks them until consent |
| Terms and imprint | Present where your jurisdiction requires them |
| Analytics | Installed once, firing on all pages, with a goal set for the primary action |
| Search Console | Property verified and sitemap submitted on launch day |
| Keyboard access | Every interactive element reachable and operable with Tab and Enter |
| Contrast | Body text and controls meet WCAG AA against their backgrounds |
| Zoom | Page usable at 200% text size without horizontal scrolling |
The first hour and the first week#
Launch is not a moment, it is a window. Most problems that make it past the checklist appear in the first hour, and the SEO ones appear over the following days.
- Load the homepage from a phone on mobile data, not from the office network.
- Submit the main form yourself and confirm the notification arrives.
- Check five old URLs redirect correctly, including one deep one.
- Confirm analytics is recording your own visit, then exclude your traffic.
- Submit the sitemap in Search Console and request indexing for the top pages.
- Watch server error logs for the first hour — new traffic patterns surface new errors.
- After a week: check Search Console coverage for unexpected exclusions and crawl errors.
- After a week: compare traffic to the old site and investigate any page that lost heavily.
Do not launch on a Friday afternoon. If something breaks, the people who can fix it are gone for two days and the problem compounds.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most common launch mistake?
A robots.txt or a noindex meta tag carried over from staging to production. The site looks perfect to everyone who visits it and is invisible to search engines, and it is often discovered weeks later when someone asks why traffic never arrived. Check robots.txt and the meta robots tag on production, on launch day, from outside your network.
Do I need to redirect old URLs?
If the old site had any traffic or any inbound links, yes. Map every old URL to its closest equivalent with a 301. Redirecting everything to the homepage is the same as deleting the pages as far as accumulated ranking signals are concerned, and it is a bad experience for anyone following an old link.
How long before search traffic recovers after a relaunch?
With clean redirects and equivalent content, typically two to six weeks of fluctuation before things settle. A dip in the first fortnight is normal. A dip that keeps deepening after a month usually means a technical problem — missing redirects, blocked crawling, or content that was cut without anyone noticing.
Should I launch everything at once or in phases?
For a site replacement, all at once is usually simpler: running two sites in parallel splits your links and creates duplicate content problems. For new sections on an existing site, phased is fine. What you should not do is launch half a structure and add the rest later without planning the URLs for what is coming.
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