20 things to check before a website goes live
Most launch-day problems get found by the first customer who clicks: a form that sends to nobody, a 404 from a link in last year’s sales deck, tracking that loads before anyone said yes to it.
Category
Free resource
Reading time
3 minutes
Here are the 20 checks we run before a site goes live, in the order we run them. Tick them off as you go.
1. Every login is in hand.
Domain registrar or DNS provider, Search Console, analytics, the CRM the forms send to. Name who holds each one.
2. Save a Search Console baseline.
Export clicks and top pages for the last 12 months. After launch, it’s how you tell a dip from a leak.
3. List every old URL.
Take the sitemap, plus the links people actually use: sales decks, email signatures, old campaigns. Each one gets a new home or a redirect.
4. Run the pre-launch pass on the real site.
Accessibility, SEO titles and descriptions, broken links, placeholder content, and every page at desktop, tablet and phone widths. In Framer, /launch-check in the Agent chat does this pass for you.
5. Read every page once, start to finish.
Lorem ipsum, last year’s dates, a team member who left, a price that changed. The people who wrote the pages usually miss these.
Example: a pricing page that still shows last quarter’s plans, because the update went into the old site and never into the new one.
6. Lower the DNS TTL.
Set it to five minutes, so the switch tomorrow spreads in minutes instead of hours.
7. Add every redirect before the switch.
Old URL to new URL, one by one. Pages that still bring in traffic go to the closest matching page, never all to the homepage.
8. Check the cookie banner loads before tracking does.
Analytics, pixels and tag manager fire only after consent.
9. Send a test through every form.
Each one lands where it should: the CRM, the right inbox, the right person.
10. Pick a quiet launch window.
Early morning in your main market, with nobody on the team presenting the site that day.
11. Switch the DNS.
Add the records your host gives you at the registrar. This is where the week-one login pays off.
12. Check SSL on every domain.
With and without www, plus any old domain that should point here.
13. Run your old URL list against the new site.
Every URL returns a 200 or a 301. Zero 404s.
14. Test every form again on desktop, tablet and phone.
Submit each one for real and check it arrives.
15. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
16. Check the share preview.
Paste the homepage into LinkedIn, X and Slack. The title, description and image are the ones you meant.
17. Watch Search Console for new 404s.
Fix each one with a redirect the same day.
18. Check analytics is counting.
Real visits, real form submissions, events firing on the pages that matter.
19. Click through the site on a phone you didn’t build it on.
Menus, buttons, video, anything that moves.
20. Hand over editing.
Your team changes one real page themselves, the same week, while someone who built it watches.
How we run it at Desses
These 20 checks run on every site we launch, and the client’s team makes their first edit before we leave. If a launch is coming up and you’d like a second pair of eyes on yours, book an intro call.