Website Launch Checklist — 47 Things to Check Before You Go Live

Launching a website with a hidden flaw is expensive in a uniquely quiet way. A broken contact form doesn't crash anything — it just silently loses you every enquiry until someone notices. A missing redirect doesn't show an error to you — it just hands your old Google rankings to your competitors.

This is the checklist we run before any site we build goes live. It's written for UK small business owners: no developer jargon where plain English will do, and notes on why each check matters so you can prioritise if you're short on time. Work through it in order — the sections are sequenced so the most silently-expensive failures get caught first.

Forms and contact details (the money checks)

1. Submit every form on the site yourself — and confirm the message actually arrives in your inbox, not just that the page says "thanks".
2. Check where form notifications go — the right email address, checked by a real person, with a backup recipient if possible.
3. Test the form's confirmation email to the customer, if there is one — right sender name, right wording, lands in inbox not spam.
4. Click every phone number on mobile — it should start a call (tel: link), not just sit there as text.
5. Click every email link — correct address, no typos. One wrong character loses every enquiry it ever receives.
6. Check your address and opening hours everywhere they appear — footer, contact page, about page — and make sure they match.
7. Test forms with rubbish input — does it handle a missing email or a pasted essay gracefully?

Content and links

8. Read every page aloud, once. You'll catch more errors in ten minutes of reading aloud than an hour of silent skimming.
9. Click every link on every page — including footer links, which are written once and forgotten.
10. Check for placeholder text — search the site for "lorem", "TBC", "coming soon" and your developer's test phrases.
11. Verify names, prices and claims — job titles, service prices, "10 years' experience" — someone will check.
12. Confirm every image is yours to use — licensed, purchased or your own. Stock photo lawsuits are real and target small businesses.
13. Check image quality on a big screen — nothing stretched, pixelated or obviously generic.
14. Make sure each page has one clear next step — a visible call to action above the fold and at the bottom.

SEO — keep the rankings you have, earn the ones you don't

15. Set up 301 redirects from every old page URL to its new equivalent. The single most expensive thing to forget: without redirects, your existing Google rankings die with the old URLs.
16. Check every page has a unique title tag — around 50–60 characters, front-loaded with what the page is about.
17. Write a meta description for every page — around 150 characters, written to earn the click.
18. One H1 per page, matching what the page is actually about.
19. Confirm the site resolves on one address only — www or non-www, http redirecting to https — not four competing versions.
20. Generate and check the XML sitemap — every real page in, every test page out.
21. Check robots.txt isn't blocking the site. Development sites are often set to "noindex" — forgetting to remove it means Google ignores your new site entirely.
22. Add schema markup — at minimum LocalBusiness with your name, address, phone and service area. It's foundational for AI search visibility.
23. Verify the site in Google Search Console and submit the sitemap on launch day.
24. Set canonical tags so near-duplicate pages point Google at the right version.

Speed and mobile

25. Run the site through PageSpeed Insights — aim for green Core Web Vitals on mobile, not just desktop.
26. Compress every image — oversized images are the number one cause of slow small-business sites.
27. Test on a real phone over mobile data, not just your office wifi — ideally on both iPhone and Android.
28. Check tap targets on mobile — buttons and menu items comfortably thumb-sized, nothing overlapping.
29. Test the mobile menu — opens, closes, every link works.
30. Check text is readable without zooming on a phone — if you're pinching, your customers are leaving.
31. Look at the site on a tablet — the forgotten screen size where layouts most often break.

Legal and compliance (UK specifics)

32. Privacy policy page — required under UK GDPR if you collect any personal data, which a contact form does.
33. Cookie notice — if you run analytics or marketing cookies, you need consent, not just a banner that says "we use cookies".
34. Terms of service — especially if you take payments or bookings through the site.
35. Company information — if you're a limited company, the Companies Act requires your registered name, number and office address on the site.
36. Accessibility basics — alt text on images, sufficient colour contrast, forms usable by keyboard. It's the law (Equality Act 2010), and it also helps your SEO.

Tracking and measurement

37. Install analytics (GA4 or a privacy-friendly alternative) and confirm it's actually recording — visit the site and watch yourself appear in real time.
38. Set up conversion tracking for form submissions and phone clicks — otherwise you'll never know what's working.
39. Exclude your own visits from analytics so you don't spend six months celebrating your own traffic.
40. Connect Google Search Console to Analytics for search query data.

Security and resilience

41. HTTPS everywhere — valid SSL certificate, padlock showing, no "mixed content" warnings.
42. Confirm who owns the domain name — it should be registered to you, not your designer. Check now, not during a dispute.
43. Know where your backups are — what's backed up, how often, and how you'd restore it.
44. Update all default passwords — hosting, CMS, email — and store them somewhere safer than a spreadsheet named "passwords".

Launch day and the week after

45. Crawl the live site for broken links (a free tool like Broken Link Checker or Screaming Frog's free tier does this in minutes).
46. Re-test every form on the live domain — forms that worked in staging can silently fail after the move. Test them again in a week.
47. Watch Search Console for the first month — crawl errors, pages dropping out of the index, and 404s from old URLs you forgot to redirect will all show up here first.

The checks people most often skip

If you only have an hour, do these five: test every form on the live site (1), set up the 301 redirects (15), remove the noindex block (21), run the mobile speed test (25), and verify analytics is recording (37). Between them they cover the failures we most often find when auditing sites that launched without a checklist — usually months later, after the damage is done.

A launch is also the cheapest moment to get the foundations right. Retrofitting proper structure, speed and schema onto a live site costs far more than building it in — which is why this checklist is baked into every web design project we deliver rather than run as an afterthought.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does this checklist take to run?

For a typical small business site of 10–20 pages, a thorough pass takes half a day. The SEO section takes longest if redirects haven't been planned. It is always cheaper than the quietest failure it prevents — a dead form or a de-indexed site can cost months of enquiries.

Do I need all 47 checks for a small five-page site?

The list shrinks naturally with the site — fewer pages means fewer links, titles and images to check — but no section can be skipped entirely. Small sites fail the same ways big ones do: broken forms, missing redirects, no analytics.

What's the most common launch mistake you see?

Two, repeatedly: launching with the development site's "noindex" setting still on, so Google ignores the new site for weeks; and redesigning without 301 redirects, so years of accumulated rankings simply evaporate. Both are five-minute fixes before launch and months of recovery after it.

My site is already live — is it too late?

Not at all. Run the same checklist as an audit: most items can be fixed on a live site, and the tracking, SEO and speed sections usually surface quick wins. Our free website audit does exactly this — we check your live site against these criteria and send you a written report within 48 hours.