Website Launch Checklist

The pre-flight check

Seven tasks to run before a site goes live. It's short on purpose — this isn't the plan for building a website, it's the list you work through in the final days to catch the things that are embarrassing in public and cheap to fix in private.

The ones people forget

Analytics before launch, not after. Retrofitting means your launch-week traffic — the most-watched week the site will have — is a blank. Confirm events are actually firing, not just that the snippet is pasted in.

Search engine visibility. Staging sites are usually blocked from indexing, and that block gets shipped to production more often than anyone admits. Check your robots file and your meta robots tags on the live domain before you announce anything.

Broken links and forms. Submit every form. Click every navigation item. Send yourself the contact form and confirm it arrives somewhere a human reads.

Test on a phone you didn't design on

Most first visits will be mobile. Load the live site on an actual phone, on cellular rather than office wifi, and see how long the hero image takes. Desktop previews hide both the layout problems and the weight.

After it's live

Keep the last tasks. Watching the analytics and error logs for the first few days is when you find the 404s from links you forgot to redirect, and the pages people expected to exist and didn't.

Timing

Run it over the final two or three days. Turn on due dates only if you're coordinating a hard cutover with someone else — otherwise it's a same-week checklist.