We run a version of this exact list at the end of every website design project before a client site goes live. It's not exhaustive theory — it's the specific set of things that, when skipped, cause the support emails and lost leads we've had to clean up on other people's launches.
Most of these mistakes share a root cause: nobody looked at the site as a stranger would. The person building it knows where every link goes, remembers the form works because they tested it once during development, and reads past a typo their eye has already adjusted to. Running through a written checklist — ideally with someone who hasn't been staring at the site for weeks — catches the things familiarity hides.
Content & pages
- Every navigation link goes to a finished page — no "coming soon" placeholders left live
- Homepage states what you do, who it's for, and the next step within the first screen
- Each core service has its own page rather than being bundled into one generic page
- Contact information (phone, email, address or service area) is consistent across every page and matches your Google Business Profile exactly
- All images have descriptive alt text, and no placeholder or watermarked stock images remain
- Spelling and grammar have been checked by a second person, not just the writer
Technical & SEO
- Every page has a unique, descriptive title tag and meta description — no duplicated defaults
- URLs are clean and readable (
/services/seo, not/page-14) - A
sitemap.xmlexists and is submitted in Google Search Console robots.txtis configured correctly — not accidentally blocking the whole site, which happens more often than you'd think on a rushed launch- 301 redirects are in place for any URLs that changed from a previous site, so old links and rankings aren't simply lost
- Analytics (and, if relevant, conversion tracking on forms and calls) is installed and verified to actually fire
If the previous site had any Google rankings at all, missing redirects on launch day is the single most expensive mistake on this list — it can erase months of accumulated ranking overnight.
Trust & conversion
- Contact form and booking flow have been tested end-to-end from a second device, not just by the builder
- Reviews or testimonials appear somewhere prominent, ideally near the main call-to-action, not buried on a separate page
- A clear primary call-to-action exists on every page — one obvious next step, not competing buttons
- Team or founder photos and bios are present if the business sells trust as much as a service (healthcare, professional services, home services)
- 404 page exists and points back to useful navigation rather than a dead end
Mobile & speed
- Every page has been checked on an actual phone, not just a resized browser window
- Tap targets (buttons, phone numbers, menu items) are large enough to hit reliably with a thumb
- Images are compressed and properly sized — no five-megabyte hero photos loading on mobile data
- Core Web Vitals have been checked with a real tool (PageSpeed Insights or similar), not assumed
- Forms don't require zooming or horizontal scrolling to complete on a small screen
Legal & compliance
- A privacy policy is published and linked from the footer of every page
- A terms of service page is published if the site sells anything, takes bookings, or has usage terms worth stating
- Cookie or tracking consent is handled appropriately for the regions you serve, if analytics or ad pixels are in use
- Any industry-specific compliance (accessibility requirements, healthcare data handling, financial disclosures) relevant to your business has been checked, not assumed to not apply
The first week after launch
Launching isn't the finish line — it's the point where real traffic starts hitting a system that, until now, only your team has tested. In the first week, check analytics daily to confirm traffic is actually being recorded and that no page is throwing errors under real-world conditions like slow connections or older phones. Watch the contact form and booking system specifically; a subtle bug that only appears with certain email providers or on certain browsers can go unnoticed for weeks if nobody's actively watching submissions come in.
It's also worth doing a second look at search visibility about a week in — confirm the site is actually being crawled and indexed, that the old site's pages (if this was a redesign) are properly redirecting rather than throwing 404s, and that nothing in the launch accidentally introduced a noindex tag left over from staging. We've seen more than one launch quietly disappear from search for weeks because a staging-environment setting shipped to production by accident — a five-minute check catches it before it costs real traffic.
Finally, tell people it launched. Update your Google Business Profile and social profiles with the new link, ask a few trusted customers to try booking or contacting you through the new site and report back anything that felt off, and keep an eye on support requests for the first couple of weeks — the fastest way to find a checklist item you missed is to have a handful of real people actually use the site before your full volume of traffic does.