The New Website Checklist: 31 Things to Verify Before Going Live

Every website launch has a moment where someone asks "are we sure it's ready?" and everyone looks at each other. A new website checklist replaces that moment with a list. The failures that hurt launches are rarely sophisticated: a contact form that submits to nowhere, a leftover noindex tag that keeps Google away for weeks, lorem ipsum surviving on page nine, analytics that were never installed so the first month of data simply does not exist.

The 31 checks below are grouped into five passes: content, technical, SEO, tracking, and legal. Run them in order in the final week before launch. Most take minutes; several have saved businesses from silent, expensive mistakes.

How do you use this new website checklist?

Work through the groups in sequence, and give each item a named owner and a written yes. "I think the developer handled that" is how items get skipped, and the skipped items cluster in the gaps between people: the designer assumes the developer did redirects, the developer assumes the marketer set up analytics, and nobody did either.

One scope note: this list is for launching a genuinely new site. If you are replacing an existing site that already ranks, you have extra migration work, redirect mapping and content parity above all, covered separately in our website redesign checklist. Run that one first, then return here for the launch-day checks, because a replacement launch has to pass both.

Items 1-8: is your content actually ready?

1. Proofread every page, out loud or with fresh eyes, since familiarity hides typos. 2. Search the whole site for placeholder text: "lorem ipsum", "your text here", and the template's default tagline. 3. Verify the phone number, email, and address everywhere they appear; one wrong digit silently discards leads forever. 4. Submit every form yourself and confirm the message actually arrives where someone will see it. 5. Check that every image has alt text and has been compressed for the web. 6. Confirm a helpful 404 page exists, with navigation back to the main pages. 7. Verify every page has a clear next step, a call, a booking, a quote request. 8. Read the entire site on a real phone, top to bottom, because that is where most visitors will meet it.

Items 9-16: does the site hold up technically?

9. HTTPS works and all HTTP addresses redirect to it. 10. The www and non-www versions resolve to a single canonical one. 11. Run PageSpeed Insights on your key pages from the mobile tab; fix anything scoring under 70 before launch, not after. 12. Crawl the site for broken links, internal and outbound. 13. A favicon exists and shows correctly in the browser tab. 14. Open the site in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, on at least one phone and one desktop. 15. Automated backups are configured and you have seen one restore succeed. 16. Uptime monitoring is pointed at the new site so you hear about downtime before customers mention it.

Items 17-23: are the SEO foundations in place?

17. Every page has a unique, descriptive title tag. 18. Every important page has a written meta description rather than an auto-generated fragment. 19. Each page has exactly one H1, and heading levels descend in order. 20. If any old site or previous URLs existed, 301 redirects point every old address at its new equivalent. 21. An XML sitemap exists and is referenced in robots.txt. 22. The staging noindex is REMOVED, the single most damaging launch mistake on this list; a site that launches with noindex in place is invisible to Google until someone notices, and that has taken companies months. 23. Google Search Console is verified and the sitemap submitted, so indexing starts on day one and problems surface in a report you actually check.

Items 24-27: will you be able to measure anything?

24. Analytics is installed on every page and you have watched a real-time session register before launch day. 25. Conversion events exist for the actions that matter, form submissions, phone taps, booking clicks, because raw traffic numbers without conversions cannot tell you whether the site works. 26. Decide deliberately whether to track phone calls, via a tracking number or tap-to-call events, and implement the decision rather than deferring it. 27. Record a baseline: screenshot or export your search rankings, traffic, and lead volume from whatever existed before, because in three months you will want to prove the new site changed something, and the before-data cannot be reconstructed afterwards.

Legal and trust: items 28-31

28. A privacy policy exists, is linked in the footer, and honestly describes what data you collect, including analytics and any forms. 29. If your visitors include EU or UK residents, or your local law requires it, cookie consent is implemented and analytics respects the choice. 30. Your legal business identity, registered name and a real address, appears in the footer or on an imprint page, both a legal requirement in many jurisdictions and a trust signal everywhere. 31. Industry-specific requirements are met: license numbers for trades, regulatory disclosures for professional services, accessibility statements where mandated. Five minutes with your industry's rules now beats a complaint letter later.

The new website checklist does not end at launch day

Launch is the start of the operating life of the site, and a short second checklist begins the day after. Watch Search Console during week one for indexing errors. Re-test the forms in production, since environment changes break things that worked on staging. Check page speed again under real hosting. And schedule the ongoing work now, publishing, updates, monitoring, because a site nobody touches after launch starts aging immediately; typical costs for that phase are in our website design cost guide.

That ongoing half is the part most launches never plan for, and it is the half WebsiteOS exists for: we build the site, run this checklist, and then keep operating the site after launch, publishing and monitoring for one flat monthly price.