Website Launch Checklist: What to Check Before and After Go-Live

Most launch problems are quiet. The site loads, the client is happy, and nobody notices for a week that the contact form has been sending enquiries nowhere, or that the analytics tag is still on the staging site.

A launch checklist is less about launch day itself and more about the handful of things that are easy to forget when you're rushing to go live, and that are expensive to discover later.

Search the whole site for placeholder text, sample images and test pages. Confirm that the phone number, email address and business address match what the client actually uses, everywhere they appear, including the footer and the contact page.

Check the image and description that appear when a page is shared on social media or in a messaging app. A missing share image is a small thing that clients notice quickly.

Confirm who owns the domain and who can log in to the registrar and DNS provider. Before changing anything, save a copy of every existing DNS record, especially the email records (MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC), and keep it outside the DNS provider. Many providers keep no history, so that copy is your way back if something stops working.

After the switch, check that the site loads over https on every version of the address (with and without www) and that they all lead to one canonical address.

“Thank you, your message has been sent” only proves the form submitted. Send a real test enquiry and confirm it lands in the client's own inbox, not in spam and not in your test address.

If the site sends email itself, make sure it sends through an authenticated service for the client's domain, so its messages aren't treated as spam.

Open the real-time report on the live domain and visit the site yourself. If nothing appears, the tag is missing, blocked or still on staging. It's a five-minute fix on launch day and a lost month of data if it's found later.

Add the live domain to Google Search Console and submit the sitemap, so you can see indexing problems and search traffic from the start.

If the site is replacing an old one, map every old URL that had traffic or links to its new equivalent and set up permanent redirects. Then test the list, not just a sample.

Check that the live site isn't still set to discourage search engines, that robots.txt isn't blocking it, and that each page's canonical address points at the live domain rather than staging.

Take a full backup before launch and confirm it can actually be restored. Agree who updates the site's software and how often, and write it down.

Record where every login lives and who holds it: domain, DNS, hosting, email, analytics. Record the location, never the passwords themselves.

Recheck the essentials on day 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30: forms still delivering, analytics still recording, no new 404s in Search Console, email still working, backups still running.

Finish with a handover: one document that tells the client what they own, where access lives and who to call, plus a short sign-off listing anything still outstanding.