Resources·General·6 min read·Updated June 2026

Website launch checklist: what to check before you go live

The checks that matter before a website goes live, in the order they matter, including the single mistake that quietly costs sites months of search traffic.

A website launch checklist covers seven things: that no staging settings leaked into production, that every link and form works, that search engines can find and index the site, that analytics is recording, that old URLs redirect to new ones, that it performs on a real phone, and that the legal pages are in place. Most launch failures are not design failures. They are small technical oversights nobody thought to check.

The uncomfortable truth about launches is that the exciting part, the design, is usually finished days before go-live. What remains is a list of unglamorous checks, and those checks are where sites quietly break. Here is what to work through, roughly in the order that the consequences get worse.

Start with the staging leftovers

Every site is built somewhere private first, and that private version carries settings that must not travel with it. The most damaging is the noindex tag, which tells search engines to stay away. It exists so your half-built site does not appear in Google, and it is correct during the build. Left on at launch, it means your new site is invisible, and because nothing looks broken, people often do not notice for weeks.

Also hunt for: placeholder text that survived into production, test blog posts and dummy contact entries, staging URLs hardcoded into links or images, and password protection still enabled on part of the site. These are trivial to fix and embarrassing to find later.

Check that everything actually works

Click every link. This is tedious and there is no substitute for it, though a link checker will catch most broken ones. Pay particular attention to links in the footer and navigation, because they appear on every page and a single broken one is repeated site-wide.

Then test the forms, and test them properly. Submitting a form and seeing a thank you message proves nothing. What matters is whether the message arrived. Send a test through every form on the site and confirm it lands in the inbox someone actually reads, not a mailbox nobody has opened since 2019. Form failures are the most expensive launch bug there is, because the site looks fine while quietly throwing away enquiries.

Finally, make sure a real 404 page exists and points people somewhere useful rather than dumping them at a dead end.

Make sure search engines can find it

Beyond the noindex check, confirm that robots.txt is not blocking anything it should not, that a sitemap exists and has been submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and that canonical URLs point where you expect.

If you are replacing an existing site, this is the highest-stakes part of the whole launch. Every old URL that has accumulated any search authority needs a 301 redirect to its equivalent new page. Skip this and you throw away years of accumulated ranking overnight, which is the single most common way a redesign makes a business worse off. Map the old URLs to the new ones before launch, not after.

Confirm something is recording

Analytics has a habit of being installed and not working. Load the site, then check that the visit appears in real-time reporting. Verify the property in Search Console so you can see indexing problems as they happen. If you have conversion goals, enquiry form submissions, phone clicks, bookings, test that they fire rather than assuming.

A launch with no working analytics means you have no idea whether the new site is performing better or worse than the old one, which makes the whole exercise unmeasurable.

Test it on a real phone

Resizing a desktop browser window is not the same thing. Pick up an actual phone and use the site the way a visitor would. Check that tap targets are big enough to hit, that the navigation opens and closes, that forms are usable with a phone keyboard, and that nothing overflows horizontally. Most of your visitors will be on a phone, so this is not a secondary check.

The technical basics

Confirm HTTPS works and the certificate is valid, and that visiting the site over http redirects to https. Pick one canonical domain, either www or non-www, and redirect the other to it rather than serving both. Compress the images, because unoptimised images are the most common cause of a slow site by a wide margin. Then run a page speed test and see where you stand.

The legal pages

You need a privacy policy. If you use cookies beyond the strictly necessary, you need consent handled properly rather than a banner that does nothing. In the UK and EU, businesses are generally required to display certain company details, so check what applies to you. And confirm the basics of accessibility, keyboard navigation and colour contrast, since these are both a legal question and a quality one.

The day after

Launch is not the finish line. In the first week, check Search Console for crawl errors and indexing problems, watch analytics for pages that get traffic and immediately lose it, and keep an eye on the inbox to confirm enquiries are genuinely coming through. Ask a few people outside the project to use the site and tell you what confused them, because you have looked at it too long to see it clearly.

If you check only three things

Confirm the noindex tag is gone, confirm the forms deliver to a real inbox, and confirm the old URLs redirect. Those three account for the overwhelming majority of launches that go quietly and expensively wrong. Everything else on this list is worth doing, but those three are the ones that cost you customers while the site looks perfectly fine.