What We Check Before Any Site Goes Live

Launch day problems are rarely creative. It's the same handful of things, over and over, which is exactly why a checklist beats a careful person having a good day.

Here's ours, in order.

Before anyone touches DNS

Every page loads. Click through the whole sitemap. Not a sample — all of it.

Every form submits, and the mail arrives. Test each form, to each recipient address, and confirm receipt. Then check spam.

Redirects are mapped. If this replaces an existing site, every old URL that has traffic or links needs a destination. Export the old sitemap, crawl it, and map one to one where you can. This is the single most commonly skipped step and the most expensive one to skip.

Analytics is installed and firing. On the new site, with the right property. Verify a real pageview appears.

Search Console is ready for the new property, with the sitemap prepared for submission.

Content and legal

• Placeholder text: gone. Search the database for "lorem", "TODO", and the theme author's name.
• Contact details correct on every page they appear.
• Copyright year current, and generated rather than typed.
• Privacy policy and terms present and reachable from the footer.
• Cookie or consent notice, if you need one, actually working rather than just present.

Technical

• robots.txt does not disallow the entire site. Staging sites are usually blocked; the number of launches ruined by shipping that block to production is not small.
• No noindex left on production pages. Same reason.
• HTTPS everywhere, with HTTP redirecting, and no mixed content warnings.
• 404 page exists, is styled, and offers a route back.
• Favicon and social preview image present — check how the homepage looks pasted into a message.
• Titles and meta descriptions unique per page.

Performance and accessibility

• Field-representative test on a mid-range phone, not a laptop.
• Images sized and compressed; no 3 MB heroes.
• Keyboard navigation reaches everything interactive, visibly.
• Colour contrast passes on body text and buttons.

The switch itself

Lower DNS TTL a day ahead. Take a final backup of both old and new. Switch during your quietest hours, not at 5 p.m. on Friday. Then watch: uptime, error logs, and form submissions, for the first hour and again the next morning.

The week after

Submit the sitemap. Watch Search Console for crawl errors and for old URLs turning up as 404s you missed. Check analytics against the old site's baseline — a 30% traffic drop after launch is almost always a redirect problem, and it's fixable if you catch it in week one rather than month three.

Why it's written down

Every item on this list is here because it went wrong once. That's the only real qualification a checklist item needs.