The most expensive launch mistakes are the invisible ones: a leftover noindex that keeps the new site out of Google, a form that sends to the developer's test inbox, an analytics tag that never fires. This checklist is split into the days before launch, launch day and the first week. Download it as a spreadsheet with a status for each check.
Before launch
- Content is final and proofread on every page — no placeholder text, test products or dummy prices
- All pages work on phones at 320 to 430 px — no horizontal scroll, menus and forms usable
- Forms send to the right inboxes and systems — submit each one and check where it arrives
- Transactional e-mails come from the real domain and reach the inbox — sign-up, order, password reset
- Payment works in live mode with a small real purchase — then refund it
- Legal pages are published — privacy policy, terms, cookie notice, imprint where required
- The cookie banner works and trackers wait for consent where required — check the network tab before clicking
- Favicon, social preview image and page titles are set — share a page in a messenger to see the preview
- A custom 404 page answers with status 404 — try a made-up address
- Speed is acceptable on a mobile test — Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 s on key pages
- Accessibility basics pass — keyboard use, visible focus, contrast, alt text, form labels
- A redirect map exists for every old URL that changes — if this replaces an old site
- A full backup and a rollback plan are ready — and someone knows how to use them
Launch day
- The staging noindex is removed — check meta robots and X-Robots-Tag on several pages
- robots.txt allows crawling and lists the sitemap — no Disallow: / left from staging
- HTTP and www variants redirect with 301 to one HTTPS address — test all four
- The SSL certificate is valid and renews automatically — check the expiry date
- Old URLs redirect to their new pages in one hop — test a sample from the redirect map
- Canonical tags use the live domain, not staging — view source
- Internal links and images do not point to the staging domain — search the HTML for the staging host
- Analytics and tag manager fire on the live domain — check real-time reports
- Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are verified for the live domain — and the sitemap is submitted
- Password protection and IP restrictions are off — open the site from a phone on mobile data
- Caching and CDN are on, and cleared after the final deploy — check response headers
First week
- Search Console shows pages being indexed and no spike of errors — Pages and Crawl stats reports
- A full crawl finds no broken links, redirect chains or stray noindex — run an audit on the live site
- Forms and checkout received real submissions — confirm with the people who receive them
- Server error rate and response times are normal — hosting monitoring
- Uptime monitoring and alerts are set up — someone gets notified at night
- Analytics shows traffic from all expected sources — compare with the old site if any