Website launch checklist

Before anyone outside the project sees it.

• Every page states what the business doesCriticalIn the buyer's words, in the first screen. The most common cause of a site that gets traffic and produces nothing.
• No placeholder text anywhereCriticalSearch the build for lorem ipsum, TODO, TBC and the client's internal codenames. These reach production more often than anyone admits.
• Contact details are correct and consistentCriticalPhone, address and hours identical to your Google Business Profile and directory listings. Inconsistency here weakens entity resolution.
• Legal pages presentPrivacy policy and terms, reflecting what you actually collect.
• Proofread by someone who did not write itAuthors cannot see their own typos. This is not a matter of care.

On staging, before the DNS change.

• Site is indexableCriticalNo stray noindex, no Disallow inherited from staging. The single most damaging launch-day error.
• Canonicals are self-referencing and correctCriticalA canonical pointing at staging or at the homepage removes the page from the index.
• Content renders without JavaScriptCriticalView source, not the inspector. Substance that only exists after hydration is often invisible to crawlers and AI retrieval agents.
• robots.txt allows the agents you wantCriticalCheck each agent individually. Retrieval agents and training agents are separate decisions — blocking a retrieval agent removes you from that engine's search entirely.
• Sitemap generated and submittedEvery indexable page present, nothing noindexed listed.
• hreflang is reciprocal if bilingualEach locale must point at the other. A one-way hreflang is ignored entirely.
• HTTPS everywhere, with HTTP redirectingCriticalIncluding www and non-www resolving to one canonical host.
• 404 page is usefulA search box and real navigation, not a dead end.

Measured on real devices, not a build machine.

• Tested on a mid-range phone on cellularCriticalWhere most of your traffic and most of your abandonment actually is. A score of ninety on a laptop tells you very little.
• Images sized and modern-formatThe most common single cause of a slow Largest Contentful Paint.
• Third-party tags auditedEvery tag marketing added, justified. This is the least examined and most common performance regression.
• Keyboard navigable end to endTab through the primary conversion path. Semantic markup serves accessibility and machine reading at once.
• Contrast meets AAChecked, not assumed from the brand palette.

Test it yourself. Do not assume.

• Submit every form end to endCriticalFill it in, send it, confirm the email arrives at a monitored inbox. Broken forms can run for weeks before anyone notices.
• Reply-To is the enquirer, not a no-replySo the sales team can respond by hitting reply.
• Analytics fires and conversions are definedCriticalWithout this you cannot tell later whether the launch worked, and the argument will not be settleable.
• Thank-you page exists and is noindexIt confirms the submission and should never appear in search.

The first week.

• Crawl the live siteBroken links, redirect chains and orphan pages, found by you first.
• Confirm indexation is progressingPages appearing in Search Console over the first days, not stalled at zero.
• Someone owns the site from todayCriticalNamed, with deploy access and a monthly review. Without this everything above degrades quietly.